


where the sky meets the sea

by lightningbend



Series: this feels like summer [2]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Established Relationship, First Time, Fluff, M/M, Porn with Feelings, Power Dynamics, Romance, Slice of Life, mingyu and wonwoo and their two kids, soft boyfriends being soft and disgustingly in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 12:35:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18165269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningbend/pseuds/lightningbend
Summary: But Mingyu isn’t the ocean where rip tides and maelstroms lie in wait. He’s the open sky. Endless. With no visible beginning or end, just the limitless horizon arcing to catch the moon and stars. He’s the warmth of dawn that lights his skin and his bones, seeping into the cracks of him, ushering the shadows to his touch, not to extinguish them but to keep them company like a steadily burning sun.





	where the sky meets the sea

 

 

It’s New Year’s Eve. There are two hours and nineteen minutes left till midnight. Two hours until the clock strikes the beginning of 2019.

Wonwoo is dressed in a sleek black suit and slacks, his shoes gleam faintly in the dark from how brightly polished they are. Mingyu picked the suit out for him on one of their (many, _many_ ) shopping expeditions after weeks of complaining about Wonwoo’s general disregard for fashion and the dire lack of tailored formalwear in his wardrobe.

He’s wearing the dark red tie Mingyu gave him for Christmas.

(“Hyung, it’s _burgundy_.” Mingyu says, fussing with his collar and straightening the knot of his tie. Wonwoo’s more interested in how his fingers keep brushing against his collarbones through his shirt. “You always look the handsomest in this shade of burgundy.”)

Mingyu was supposed to meet him in Gangnam after work because even though the rest of the world gets to have the night off, there’s no busier time of the year for tireless emergency services workers keeping the city’s catastrophes at bay than New Year’s Eve.

They were going to gather at the Han River like so many other couples and somes and people feeling hopeful and romantic at the turn of the new year, and they were supposed to kiss when the clock struck twelve. Wonwoo isn’t one for grand romantic gestures, but he _is_ sentimental, and soft-hearted about most things — nearly _everything_ — when it comes to Mingyu, and it seemed like the perfect way to commemorate their first almost-one-month-anniversary of being together, a landmark, a milestone signifying the start to something precious. 

There are eighty-four minutes now till the end of the night and the start of 2019 and Mingyu is nowhere to be seen.

Wonwoo sighs, gaze sliding away from his watch as he sits alone at a table inside the exclusive five-star restaurant Mingyu had picked out. Any longer and he’s going to be politely asked if he’d like another glass of exorbitantly priced wine to make up for the reservation he’s wasting.

At the half hour mark of him sitting awkwardly inside this Michelin starred fine dining restaurant, Wonwoo decides to leave. He pays the bill for the two glasses of wine he’s downed in his anxiety and keeps his head down as exits, trying not to look like a man who’s been ghosted on the worst day of the year to be alone.

Wonwoo might have corrected them (“Listen, _sir_ , I’ll have you know my boyfriend is currently busy working right now. He’s a paramedic and the strongest, bravest, smartest person I know and the only reason he isn’t here right now is because he’s somewhere saving people in need and he’d do the same for all of _you_ and your loved ones.”) if he wasn’t feeling a little sorry for himself and the fact that he’s going to be greeting the new year all by himself. 

It’s not that he doesn’t understand why Mingyu can’t be here right now. It’s certainly not that he’d ever want Mingyu to sacrifice his work just to appease his need to have this one silly, soft, romantic moment. 

It’s just that — Wonwoo really, _really_ wanted to kiss Mingyu at the Han River beneath the fireworks in the first seconds of the new year. He wanted it: every bit of the cheesy, sentimental, straight-out-of-a-makjang-drama overkill. Because it’s Mingyu. Because it’s how he wanted to celebrate the beginning of their first real year together as a couple. 

But Wonwoo gets it.

This is the price he has to pay when his boyfriend is a real life everyday superhero. 

His KaTalk chirps with a new notification and Wonwoo’s not embarrassed to admit that he unlocks his phone and opens it faster than his body can even think to breathe.

 

 

 **mingyu >>>  wonwoo**  
hyung i’m so sorry  
I feel terrible I’m so sorry to do this to you but it’s work stuff. As usual…  
I really wanted to be there tonight but there’s just too much to do  
Jinah noona says I should just go but we’re understaffed I’d feel even worse leaving them  
I’m so so so sorry hyung.  
I’m the worst boyfriend ever

 

 

Wonwoo’s mouth twitches. If Kim Mingyu wasn’t so selfless and generous and tirelessly dedicated to his work and helping those in need, he wouldn’t be the man he loved, would he?

He traces his fingertip absentmindedly over the string of crying puppy stickers Mingyu sends him, envisioning Mingyu’s real life pout on the other side of the screen with perfect clarity. The big, sad, mournful puppy eyes. His hunched over shoulders making him seem small.

 

 

 **wonwoo**  
Don’t say that, you’re not  
I understand. It’s alright, work is work  
It’s fine, really

 

 **mingyu**  
I’m sorry, I really wanted to come.  
I should’ve called you earlier when I thought I might not make it but I just…  
I really thought I would. I wanted to.

 

 **wonwoo  
**Mingyu, it’s okay. I know

 

 **mingyu  
**I hate this

 

 **wonwoo  
**So do I. But how can I complain when you’re out there saving lives and helping people?

 

 **mingyu  
**but you’re important to me too

 

 **wonwoo  
**We can always reschedule. It’s not like we can’t have dinner any other time of the year

 

 **mingyu**  
i know  
i just  
really wanted to kiss you at midnight  
cause you’re the best thing that happened to me this year  
i want to be your best thing next year.  
and all the years

 

 

Wonwoo sucks in a small, sharp gust of air through his teeth.

The way Mingyu can make his heartbeat stutter when he’s not even physically present is something Wonwoo’s never going to get used to.

 

 

 **wonwoo**  
go be a hero  
I’ll be fine. I’ll see you after you finish work if I’m not already asleep

 

 **mingyu**  
i love you hyung  
I love you  
<3

 

 

Wonwoo really, _really_ wants to kiss him.

It must be the time and day and the thought of not seeing Mingyu again until tomorrow morning, until _next year_ , and the certainty of Mingyu saying _and all the years_ that sparks the feeling of want and longing in him so intense it hits him like the first, heady, breathless gasp of air when you’ve been underwater for a little too long.

These past seven and a half months they’ve known each other, the two months (eighteen days) they’ve been officially together, are a glimmer of brilliance burning at the end of a long stretch of grey mediocrity. His life, before Mingyu, and after, is so polarised Wonwoo doesn’t recognise the ordinariness of his every day routine anymore without the constant of Kim Mingyu. He hates how clichéd and theatrical it sounds but it’s _true_ , it’s mere fact, the way Mingyu is to his existence the way sunlight is to the sky.

Wonwoo has never been a romantic person. The things people do for love are often reckless and rarely logical, and before Mingyu, Wonwoo used to think they were extravagant, unnecessary wastes of time. The big romantic gestures of a culture obsessed with love, infatuated with the concept of dating and public displays of being a couple — as if merely being in love wasn’t enough to satisfy the criteria of a relationship anymore — seemed shallow and inconsequential.

But Mingyu brings him flowers every week on a Wednesday. Different bouquets of roses and lilies and sunflowers, all because he found Wonwoo reading a biological encyclopaedia once about the language of flowers. He’d asked very innocently if he could borrow the book for a few days, and ever since then it’s been a habit. 

Mingyu kisses him awake on a Sunday morning and tells him he has ten minutes to get dressed because he’s packed them a picnic and the beach is waiting for them.  

Mingyu cooks him his favourite meals when Wonwoo’s been having a long week at work, welcomes him home with kisses on Friday night and the smell of home-cooked love. He takes him into his arms when he needs to be held, and lets him be alone when he needs the quiet to gather himself back together into the semblance of a person. He always knows exactly what to say or do or be.

Mingyu says _I love you_ like it’s the first time he’s saying it, every single time.

Mingyu _deserves_ capital R romance. 

He deserves the sweepingly dramatic, extravagant gestures of love and devotion and forever. He deserves everything the world over that Wonwoo couldn’t even possibly begin to give him.

But… maybe there _is_ something that he can do tonight.

If Mingyu can’t be here to kiss him at midnight, Wonwoo will just have to bring the kiss to him.

His mind flickers with possibilities, traffic routes, plans of action. He’s got forty-seven minutes to get halfway across Seoul. All for a midnight kiss. 

Mingyu’s worth it. He has always been worth it.

 

 

\-----

 

 

Wonwoo’s panting and devastatingly out of breath when he staggers in through the automatic doors of the E.R. room at Severance Hospital. The nurse at reception looks alarmed, and then her face immediately steels into a grave, focused expression and she opens her mouth to alert someone when Wonwoo holds his hand up and waves her off bashfully.

He’s fine. _See?_ Wonwoo gestures at himself to clear up the misunderstanding, plastering a sweaty, half-hearted smile to his face. He’s not in any physical pain or danger; he just ran three blocks in under seven minutes after ditching his car on the side of the street and he’s growing increasingly worried about his chances of finding Mingyu before time is up.

“Hi,” he wheezes as he stalks stiffly over to the reception counter. “I’m sorry to bother you but — ” Wonwoo bends, hands on his waist the only things anchoring him to gravity at the moment, and gasps for breath, “— Do you happen to know a Kim Mingyu?” 

The nurse squints at him for a few seconds, the judgement vastly clear in her side-eye. Wonwoo can only imagine what he looks like: silk tie slung loose around his neck and the sleekly pressed lines of his suit ruined by his impromptu marathon, his hair looking like he’s been through a wind tunnel and not like he’d had it professionally styled and curled just for this evening. 

“Oh!” Her eyes widen in recognition. Which is odd, given that Wonwoo’s certain he’s never met her before. “You must be Jeon Wonwoo-ssi.” 

Wonwoo clears his throat awkwardly. “Uh, yeah. _Yes._ That would be me.”

“You’re Mingyu’s boyfriend.”

Wonwoo can feel the tips of his ears heating. He _knows_ he is, has been for over two weeks now. It just. Sounds different coming from someone else’s mouth, is all.

“That’s me.”

“He’s probably in the on-call room on the third floor. If you run you can probably still — ”

All Wonwoo’s done for the past fifteen minutes _is_ run; he’s off before she can even finish her sentence.

“Thank you!” He yells over his shoulder, already out of breath from pushing his body beyond its natural limits. He hurls himself up three flights of stairs, skidding through the doorway leading to the corridor of the third floor, pausing briefly only to gather his bearings and reorient himself.

He finds the on-call room, and before he can think twice about bursting into it unannounced, he’s already through the door.

For a moment, Wonwoo can’t do anything other then wheeze and gasp for breath, his body going into overdrive trying to pump oxygen throughout the rest of him.  

“ _Wonwoo-hyung?_ ”

Mingyu is staring at him slack-jawed, and it’s worth sprinting half a marathon just to see his face caught in an impressionist blur of shock, amazement, _happiness_.

“Wonwoo-hyung, what are you doing here?”

Mingyu’s clutching at the thermos in his hand like it’s an IV drip; his eyes are tinged a little red, slightly bloodshot from being worked into the ground this whole week; his hair is messy and dishevelled from sweat and his habit of constantly running his fingers through it; there are dark smudges and soot stains scattered across his uniform, a streak of smoke or dirt disappearing into his hairline from the corner of his temple.

He’s the most beautiful thing Wonwoo’s ever seen.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Wonwoo gasps, glancing down at his watch and then back up at Mingyu. “It’s 12:07.”

Mingyu closes his mouth with a soft click of his teeth, the astonishment yet to fade from his eyes as he gives Wonwoo a belated onceover. The happiness brimming from his face, his body language, his whole being, burns bright enough to touch even from where Wonwoo’s standing at the threshold of the room.

“ _Hyung._ ” 

Wonwoo doesn’t need to be asked twice. He closes the distance between them, the space swallowed up in a heartbeat by the thundering of his breath and his pulse coming sharp and fast, and then he’s crushing his lips against Mingyu’s, the first brush of their mouths like their very own burst of fireworks. Electric, and dazzling.

He grasps at Mingyu’s jaw with both hands, fingers splaying across his cheeks as he kisses him and kisses him, pouring every inch of longing and love and affection into the kiss. It’s not cinematic, not big rising orchestral crescendo worthy; there’s no billion won pyrotechnic extravaganza exploding in the night sky overhead, no taste of expensive champagne or three Michelin star desert lingering on their lips. It’s not the way this night should’ve gone. But it’s perfect. 

It’s perfect, just the two of them.

He hears the clattering of Mingyu’s thermos falling to the floor and hopes it’s less than half-full as he presses higher on his tip toes to take advantage of the distraction and slips his tongue into Mingyu’s mouth. Mingyu’s breath hitches, Wonwoo knows because he can feel the way his throat jumps underneath his palms. He’s always so responsive, so aware of Wonwoo’s every movement, the way he moves like he can anticipate Wonwoo’s thoughts before he even thinks them.

He breaks away to kiss at Mingyu’s bottom lip, sucking against it softly, coaxing a gasp out of him with the tip of his tongue, and then harder with the promise of teeth sinking into the give of soft lips. Mingyu lets slip a sound that’s almost a whimper, caught in the back of his throat like he’s trying to keep himself from falling apart in Wonwoo’s hands. 

Wonwoo kisses Mingyu’s jaw, and then his neck, the place right beneath his ear that never fails to make him gasp and shudder and go boneless at Wonwoo’s touch. He runs his fingers through Mingyu’s hair, stroking against the shorter hairs at the base of his neck as he presses his lips to Mingyu’s skin like he’s composing a song out of him — each note, each breath, eliding in a delicate melody of Mingyu’s soft gasps and desperately muffled sounds. Wonwoo plays him like his favourite symphony, like music. Mingyu melts into his touch like a recurring leitmotif, the hitches of his breath like a staccato scale going up and up.

Wonwoo kisses Mingyu with a mouth full of heat, his fingertips like firebrands. He sucks softly, tantalisingly, at Mingyu’s tongue, the taste of embers burning low but still alight in his throat.

“ _Mingyu-yah_.” Wonwoo breathes against Mingyu’s mouth, when he’s content that he’s thoroughly ravished and destroyed Mingyu’s ability to think about anything other than his lips. He tips his head against Mingyu’s, his gaze still looked on Mingyu’s simmering down to something quieter, but no less intense.

“ _Happy New Year._ ” 

Mingyu lets out a shaky exhale, eyes wide and shaken, his chest rising and falling rapidly. For a few seconds, all he does is stare at Wonwoo as he attempts to catch his breath.

“Happy New Year, hyung” he manages to say, voice rough and gravelled. Wonwoo’s handiwork, he notes with a flicker of satisfaction.

Wonwoo laughs, surging up to kiss Mingyu again. Softer this time, less like fireworks and flying sparks and more like the slow, pervasive heat of a fireplace burning steadily through the night. Mingyu melts into the kiss, all sweetness, pliant and easy. Wonwoo cups his face in his hands, presses small, gentle kisses at his mouth, one after the other, strung together like a daisy chain and achingly tender.

“You got me my midnight kiss after all.” Mingyu says, still slightly breathless. The tinge of awe to his voice making it higher and softer. His eyes are wide and a little glassy as he blinks rapidly, possibly in an attempt to hold back tears.

“I did.” Wonwoo brushes a lock of hair from Mingyu’s forehead, fingertips brushing Mingyu’s skin in the barest of caresses.

“You didn’t have to.” Mingyu murmurs, a light blush settling across his cheeks. “You didn’t have to come all this way.”

“I did. I did have to, because I wanted to kiss you.” Wonwoo says.

Mingyu makes a soft, contented noise in his throat, curling in on himself like he’s suddenly shy at the thought of being under the spotlight of Wonwoo’s full romantic attention. He’s so _cute_ , so bashful and unassuming when it comes to Wonwoo being the one to make a first move and do something loving and openly affectionate, it steals Wonwoo’s breath.

“Because _you_ are the best thing that happened to me last year.”

Wonwoo takes Mingyu’s chin into his hand, tilts it down with the slightest pressure of his fingertips. He can feel Mingyu’s breath on his skin, unsteady as if Wonwoo still has the power to make his pulse race like the first time after all the kisses they’ve already had. Wonwoo looks into Mingyu’s eyes, looks into the eyes of this man that loves him, that adores him and occasionally drives him crazy, and thinks _how incredibly lucky he is_ _to have found him_. How unbelievably happy he is to be able to call him his. 

Wonwoo doesn’t believe in fate, or soulmates, or superstitions like _perfect other halves_ , but being the person Kim Mingyu chooses to love is as close as he’ll ever get to experiencing the profound.  

“I want to be your best thing for all the years to come, too.”

He presses his lips to Mingyu’s, kissing away the taste of Mingyu’s smile, the warmth of their mouths like first sunlight on a winter morning, the heat rising to chase away the cold.

 

 

\-----

 

 

Mingyu is a little spoon that says he is a big spoon and is very reluctant about being exposed for what he really is. Wonwoo discovers this as a fact in the first few weeks of their relationship, along with Mingyu’s other sleeping habits. 

He likes sleeping on the left side of the bed, which is Wonwoo’s own favoured side of the bed but being as Mingyu as a guest in his house and his newly minted boyfriend, Wonwoo decides this is a hill he can die on another day. Mingyu hogs the covers when he sleeps and unknowingly takes up more space than he thinks he does, being six foot two, but always looks so puppyish and apologetic in the mornings when Wonwoo brings it up that Wonwoo doesn’t have the heart anymore to mention it. He snores, just a little sometimes, if his rhinitis is playing up.

Wonwoo doesn’t really care how he sleeps, when he gets the rare chance to. These days, the comfort of Mingyu waiting in his bed drives him away from his work more often than he should let it. But Mingyu has always been very persuasive when he wants to be, and he’s far more demanding now that they’re a couple. 

(“Hyung, you said _ten minutes_. It’s been eleven.” 

“Are you timing me now?” 

“Yes!” Mingyu pads over to Wonwoo’s desk, looking small and sleep-soft in one of Wonwoo’s oversized sweaters, the sleeves hanging like paws over his fingers. “I’m tired. Come to bed.”

“Just a few more minutes, Mingyu.”

“No.” Mingyu drops his arms around Wonwoo’s chest, head flopping onto his uninjured shoulder. “It’s two o’clock in the morning.” 

Wonwoo reaches a hand up to ruffle his hair, sighing as he leans instinctively back when Mingyu noses against his throat. The next thing he knows, Mingyu is pressing an open-mouthed kiss to his jaw, wet, teasing, and warm. Wonwoo huffs out a sigh, moving to pull away when he feels Mingyu bite down. 

He yelps, high and startled, fingers tightening in Mingyu’s hair. 

“ _Mingyu._ ”

Mingyu hums against his skin and Wonwoo can feel him smiling mischievously because he’s bound to have left a mark. God damn him and his unnecessarily sharp canines. 

“ _Wonwoo_ ,” Mingyu answers, the shape of Wonwoo’s name without honorific reverberating low in his throat, _flirtatious_. The edges of his hair tickle against Wonwoo’s skin as he tilts his head. 

“If I come to bed will you stop attacking my neck like a starving vampire?” 

“Mm. I’ll think about it.”

“You should come with an instruction manual. ‘Gets bitey when he’s impatient’.”

“You like it,” Mingyu teases. “You said I have cute teeth.”

“I was on my _deathbed_.”

Mingyu smiles, and it’s the kind of honeyed, caramelised sweet smile that makes Wonwoo want to kiss him just to keep him from saying whatever he’s about to say.

“You said it was your last thought before you passed out after being _shot_ ,” Mingyu presses, sounding pleased, sounding delightfully smug for someone talking about his boyfriend’s near-death experience.

“I was delirious, clearly out of mind. I do _not_ have a biting kink.”

“Funny how you didn’t have any complaints last night, or the night before, or the —” 

Wonwoo places a hand on Mingyu’s face, cupping his jaw gently as if he’s about to draw him in for a tender kiss and promptly shoves his face away with all the strength he can muster at a moment’s notice. Mingyu startles, and reeling backwards and losing his balance with a stumble and a cry of alarm. 

Wonwoo would feel bad, he really would, but it’s what he deserves. 

“You can sleep on the couch tonight,” he says, already heading in the direction of their bedroom. (How long has been unconsciously referring to it as _theirs_ now?)

“Hyung, _wait_!”) 

Mingyu likes snuggling before bed, but he can and will snuggle anywhere, at any given time.

He likes curling around Wonwoo, long limbs tangling around Wonwoo’s, his leg slipping between Wonwoo’s legs as he buries his face in Wonwoo’s shoulder and neck. It’s a little suffocating and too-hot too-warm at times, especially with the heater on, but Wonwoo doesn’t mind running a little hot if it means never having to wake up cold in the mornings in the heart of winter. Sleeping — _just_ sleeping — with Mingyu is like having his very own body length hot pack.

(If only he could carry him around with him in his pocket wherever he goes. His very own personal heater.) 

Mingyu doesn’t like to admit it, but his favourite sleeping position is on his side, curled like a question mark, with Wonwoo’s arms wrapped around him and his legs tucked right up behind his. He sleeps so well like this that sometimes Wonwoo wakes up before he does to the sound of his morning alarm. Wonwoo can tell how much Mingyu likes it just by how long it takes him to drag himself out of bed and go on his run. 

Mingyu’s morning person nature is only the second most annoying thing about him. Because scientifically speaking, Mingyu _isn’t_ a morning person. He does it out of some weird gym rat obligation — as if the only time to go for a jog is at the ass crack of dawn — and because his sleeping patterns are irregular and screwed up by default due to his work schedule. 

The number one most annoying thing about living with Kim Mingyu is how tidy he is. Wonwoo had expected this; he’s been to Mingyu’s own spotless Architectural Digest apartment enough times to know he’s a compulsive neat freak. (It’s actually kind of nice having someone in the house who cares this much about dust and floorboards and which brand of cleaning agent is safe enough for Byeol but will make the surfaces in Wonwoo’s house gleam and sparkle like they’re brand new.)

The only downside to how much Mingyu likes to clean is that it involves a lot of bending and stretching and occasional sweating. And Mingyu only ever seems to clean in a singlet and sweatpants that are forever riding down from his hips.

Wonwoo hates it.

If he wasn’t currently recovering from a near fatal injury, he’d be fairly certain his boyfriend is trying to kill him.

It’s been two weeks since he’s been officially allowed to come back to work from his period of mandatory rest. His body said _fuck_ healing and adequate recovery times the moment Mingyu walked into that hospital room when Wonwoo was higher than a kite on morphine, and has been in a permanent state of fight or flight ever since.

His boyfriend is a very handsome, very beautiful man. He’s tall and statuesque and built like a supermodel. Wonwoo has always been very aware of this. It’s one thing to know this and another to have to _experience_ it every living second for extended stretches of time in his constant vicinity.

Mingyu comes back from the gym every Tuesday and Thursday night if he’s not on call in the evening. Wonwoo always makes sure not to be in the living room when he comes home; his body can only handle so many sudden bouts of light-headedness from all the blood in his body draining southwards.

He’s _human._ And seeing his very attractive, very ripped boyfriend coming home in his workout gear, all pumped up on post-workout endorphins and adrenaline like another excitable puppy, would be enough to drive anyone crazy, let alone someone who’s spent half a year pining over him and the last month or so incapable of doing anything about his increasingly life-threatening case of blue balls.

He walked into the kitchen once to find Mingyu reaching for the cupboards above the stove, his shirt riding up and revealing the v line of his stomach and the faint dustings of hair above the waistband of his pants, and had to turn and walk out before he could pass out and accidentally (conveniently) hit his head on any sharp objects. 

It’s exhausting, constantly being on the lookout for Danger Zones — the most hazardous locations being the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, Wonwoo’s own bedroom.

He never knows when he’s about to be accosted by an unwittingly erotic Mingyu.

One time, Mingyu had come out of the shower with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist and Wonwoo had frozen in mid-step, knuckles going bone-white around the mug in his hand. 

He’d choked on the tea in his mouth and nearly tripped over Byeol, which, _of course_ , prompted Mingyu to rush over and start pounding at his back in an attempt to dislodge the tea from his throat. But seeing Mingyu _that_ close, all rippling wet muscle and condensation on bare skin, had sent Wonwoo into another coughing fit. He’d fled to his office and refused to come out for an hour despite Mingyu’s pleas and barrage of text messages apologising for “being so tempting and sexy while naked that Wonwoo-hyung nearly had a stroke”. 

Mingyu has been banned from leaving the bathroom wearing any less than two items of clothing — top _and_ bottom — for the sake of Wonwoo’s health and mental wellbeing.

Nothing, really, has changed much from the Before Dating part where he’d been agonising and overthinking everything about his overwhelming attraction to Mingyu. The After Confessing and Currently Dating part where he’s still agonising and overthinking everything about his overwhelming attraction to Mingyu is _still_ making him lose sleep. It’s still slowly driving him insane. 

Now and then, Mingyu will kiss him. For no reason other than because he wants to. Soft and lingering, his hands pulling him close and closer still as the warmth of his mouth against Wonwoo’s spreads, slow and heated, throughout his chest like smoke and embers. And Wonwoo will remember why this is the best part of being with Mingyu. 

And then the kiss will deepen, Mingyu’s fingers raking through his hair, his hands hitching Wonwoo against the wall, or into his lap, or circling around his waist, and then Wonwoo wants to die.

A part of him _does_ die a little every time Mingyu pulls away mid-kiss, just when things have strayed beyond the territory of soft, tender kisses and innocent touches. Mingyu always seems to remember at the last moment, when Wonwoo’s hand is tugging at his waistband and slipping beneath it, his palm warm where it’s flattened against Mingyu’s abs. He always catches Wonwoo at the last second, fingers curling around Wonwoo’s wrist and pulling him away, kissing sweetly at his fingertips and then his palm instead almost like he’s saying _sorry_. 

It’s stupid because Mingyu has nothing to be sorry for.

But he also refuses to let Wonwoo go any further than his waistline when they’re in bed, like he’s made an oath to suffer at Wonwoo’s side when Wonwoo can and _has_ given head before with only one hand.

(Mingyu chuckles, pulling him up and away when Wonwoo protests and gestures at Mingyu’s very explicitly loud, rock-hard crotch region.

“It’s fine, hyung.” Mingyu says softly, sweetly, like he’s whispering sweet nothings against his mouth rather than talking about his monstrously (large, Wonwoo’s mind unhelpfully supplies any time the topic _arises_ ) inconvenient erection. “I’m used to it. It’s not like I don’t have practice from all the months before I confessed to you.”)

These past few weeks have been the happiest of Wonwoo’s life. They’ve also been the hardest. Literally.

Wonwoo would happily die, fuck doctor’s orders and ten week recovery periods for bullet wounds, if it meant finally getting to feel Mingyu kiss him and touch him, and — _make love_ to him.

On his headstone, they could put: _Here lies Jeon Wonwoo, he died doing what he loved._

He catches Mingyu looking at him sometimes when he thinks Wonwoo isn’t looking (it’s cute, the way Mingyu looks at him like he’s his first middle school crush, how he glances abruptly away when he’s been caught as if they haven’t seen each other without clothes on, and kissed, bare against each other) and Wonwoo knows Mingyu feels it, too. Mingyu is impatient about everything else in his life; he _hates_ waiting. 

Mingyu looks at Wonwoo sometimes, and Wonwoo thinks Mingyu would wait forever if it meant just getting to be with him.

It’s all the more reason Wonwoo needs his body to get the fuck over itself, speed up its healing process, kick his white blood cells into gear, so Mingyu can get dicked down (or do the dicking down if that’s what he wants) the way he so clearly deserves.

 

 

\-----

 

 

Soojin comes by Wonwoo’s apartment on a Friday night to pick up her luggage. Her family has insisted on her staying with them for the rest of her time in Korea and they’re on even better terms now than before after taking some time to just talk and listen and get everything out in the open.

Mingyu’s the one who greets her at the door, wide-eyed and caught off-guard. Soojin breaks out into a teasing smile when she sees the expression on his face, tapping playfully at his arm as she steps in through the door. 

“How are you going to look at me like that when I’m the reason you two managed to finally get your shit together, Kim Mingyu-ssi?”

“I — Sorry!” Mingyu stutters, cutely. He’s cute when he stutters, the soft lisp of his words catching on his tongue. “I didn’t, um. I’m really grateful, Soojin-ssi! Really. I was just, uh. Nervous? I guess?”

“What, you think just because I’m Wonwoo’s Big Bad Ex I wouldn’t be happy to see you together?”

Mingyu flusters, the words on his tongue tripping and stumbling in an effort to rush out of his mouth. “It’s not — I didn’t mean —” 

“Soojin, stop messing with him.” Wonwoo says as he comes over to take Soojin’s coat.

Soojin laughs as she bends to pick up Byeol who leaps delightedly into her arms and nuzzles at her cheek.

“I’m just kidding, Mingyu.” Soojin grins, ruffling Byeol’s hair and kissing his nose. “And call me noona. If I’m going to trust you to take care of Wonwoo, I’d like us to be close.”

“I — I’d like that, too.” Mingyu says, bright-eyed and looking pleasantly surprised. “Soo —  _noona_.”

“You say that as if I can’t take care of myself.” Wonwoo crosses his arms over his chest.

Mingyu and Soojin both glance over at him and then at each other and promptly burst into laughter.

“Hyung, I’ve seen you burn rice. Your idea of a home-cooked meal is instant ramyeon and a fried egg.”

Soojin’s eyes are glittering as she shoots Mingyu a playful smirk. “Oh, I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”

 

 

\-----

 

 

As it turns out, Soojin had been the one to contact Mingyu to explain the big misunderstanding.

They’d met for coffee and brunch and Soojin had made it clear to Mingyu that she and Wonwoo were _not_ dating and had _not_ gotten back together and that there was nothing to worry about as far as Wonwoo’s romantic and emotional availability was concerned. 

Mingyu had been convinced she was setting an elaborate trap to humiliate him and call him out for lusting after her boyfriend all these months, and was biding her time to tell him to back off or risk getting his ass beat by a woman with a black belt in taekwondo. 

It had been a pleasant shock when she’d not only informed him that Wonwoo was single, but that he had her unconditional support and approval to confess to him.

Together they’d come up with a rough plan for how he would do it. According to Soojin, it had involved a dinner at Wonwoo’s favourite restaurant (light, casual, nothing overly fancy or formal) followed by a walk beside the Han River (Wonwoo’s favourite thing to do when he gets caught up in his head and needs to clear his mind, to center himself).

But then Mingyu had come over the night Wonwoo was discharged from the hospital, and the rest, _well_ — it’s not quite history yet, but it will be, one day, in the story of how they met and how they became the most important people in each other’s lives, and how they fell in love. 

Soojin leaves not long after gathering all her suitcases with a flurry of promises for them to all have dinner soon, and tear-eyed goodbye kisses for Byeol. 

“She’s so cool.” Mingyu sighs when he shuts the door behind Soojin. “She’s so successful and ambitious and _pretty_. I can’t believe you got someone like _Soojin-noona_ to date you.” 

“Yah,” Wonwoo huffs. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s a compliment.” Mingyu’s quick to reassure him, still looking a little starry-eyed.

“ _Yah_ ,” Wonwoo echoes. “Are you saying I’m not a catch?”

“I mean, yeah, but you’re like… you think tracksuits are acceptable to wear 24/7 and you live off convenience store food when you’re too busy to cook really terrible food and Soojin-noona’s just… — _wow_.” 

Wonwoo scoffs, and then strides over to Mingyu with a few swift steps; Mingyu braces like he’s worried Wonwoo is going to physically retaliate. Wonwoo tilts his face up so he can meet Mingyu’s gaze level. He teases him, toying with Mingyu’s focus, drawing out the moment like heat licking at the tip of a struck match and burning down to the end, savouring the flicker of nervousness on Mingyu’s face.

“I got _you_ , didn’t I?”

Wonwoo lowers his lashes the way he does when he’s about to kiss Mingyu, the look in his eyes going dark and heated. He uses the voice, low and velvet smooth, that always stops Mingyu’s breath short.

Mingyu goes pink, and then red, as he presses his hand to face so he can hide his blush. His breath catches; he stares, unblinking, fixed on Wonwoo’s gaze as his mouth parts, tongue flicking out to wet his lips like his throat has gone abruptly dry. He draws in a shaky, trembling breath, and then promptly doubles over into full-bodied giggles. 

“ _Hyung_ ,” he wheezes, gasping wildly for breath amidst his laughter, “ _The look on your face_.”

Mingyu lowers his voice several octaves, his face going grave and mock serious as he echoes him: “” _I got_ you _, didn’t I?_ ”” He bends over as he bursts into another series of high-pitched giggles, hands pressed to his mouth. Despite his laughter, he manages to duck out of Wonwoo’s grasp when he reaches out to smack him, giggling maniacally as he darts away. 

“Yah!” Wonwoo snaps, his voice torn between a growl and a helpless laugh. “ _You little shit._ Get back over here and say that to my face again.” 

““ _I’m Jeon Wonwoo.”_ ” Mingyu teases, nearly tripping over himself as he dissolves into another round of giggles. “” _I could get_ all _the men and women I want just with this voice. My big sexy deep voice, deeper than the Mariana Trench.” Wonwoo_ , oh my god — I can’t _breathe_.” 

“ _Just wait till I get my hands on you_ , you can forget about breathing altogether.”

 

 

\-----

 

 

 

 **soonyoung >>>  69 years together  
**ok soooo whats the plan here :))))))))))

 

 **jihoon  
**whats the plan for what

 

 **jun  
**for whomst

 

 **soonyoung  
**omg baby we were talking about this the other day, Helloooo

 

 **jihoon  
**…

 

 **jun  
**are yall really just here to flirt in front of my salad bc i WILL leave this group chat

 

 **jihoon**  
do it  
its too late for me but save urself junathan

 

 **wonwoo  
**What is going on

 

 **soonyoung**  
omg WONWOo. Finally. just in time.  
unfortunately we couldn’t be here to do this in person as jihoonie and i are on a romantic couples trip in Osaka

 

 **wonwoo  
**why are you saying this like we don’t know

 

 **soonyoung**  
for the official record wonu  
the countdown to d-day meeting is now in session

 

 **jun**  
D-day lmao  
your Mind

 

 **soonyoung  
**i know im brilliant

 

 **wonwoo  
**what in the fuck is a d-day

 

 **soonyoung  
**dick day. D-DAY. Dick appointment day. Day of officially getting that d

 

 **wonwoo  
**absolutely not

 

 **soonyoung  
**wh – WHY??? you havent even heard me out yet :((

 

 **wonwoo  
**oh i wasn’t aware you were involved in my relationship

 

 **soonyoung  
**why would u say that when u KNOW how i feel and how invested i am in ur happiness and emotional wellbeing

 

 **jihoon**  
he’s been talking about this literally non stop bls won woo im begging  
i took a five hour nap yesterday and when i woke up he was STILL talking about it

 

 **jun  
**LITERALLY. NON. MF. STOP. it has been madness. We are exhausted.

 

 **wonwoo  
**jihoon its not my fault your boyfriend is too distracted with someone elses sex life to focus on yours

 

 **jun**  
OMG….. JEON WONWOO WTF THAT SOME OUT OF POCKET SHIT WTF  
i ‘M  love u

 

 **jihoon  
**i’ll have you know that he’s only had time to bring it up today despite us being on day 6 of a 10 day trip because we took a break

 

 **jun  
**holy shit

 

 **wonwoo  
**look i appreciate the thought but it’s really not a big deal

 

 **soonyoung**  
HOW can it possibly not be a Big DEaL??  
it’s the first time yall gonna do the dance with no pants  
the horizontal cha cha  
the bedroom rodeo  
the four legged twerk  
the kjf KSDJkaJfj

 

 **jihoon**  
I have confiscated his phone  
He is on a five minute ban

 

 **wonwoo  
**oh thank god

 

 **jun**  
he’s just being dramatic ignore him  
but we are happy for you wonwoo ♥  
when’s the exact d-date anyway?

 

 **wonwoo  
**20th february

 

 **jun  
**uwu bet you have it specially marked in your calendar and everything

 

 **wonwoo  
**…

 

 **jihoon  
**you two kids got anything special planned?

 

 **wonwoo  
**.....should we?

 

 **jihoon**  
idk man its your dick appointment  
but mingyu literally wont shut up about it either

 

 **wonwoo**  
wait what  
what has he said about it??

 

 **jihoon**  
that hes all excited n shit  
don’t tell him i said this but it’s kind of cute  
he’s adorable  
and super horny

 

 **jun  
**ha the silence means he’s blushing

 

 **wonwoo  
**i am not

 

 **jun  
**sure jan

 

 **jihoon**  
i think he’s got something planned  
i mean, its mingyu  
of course he would  
he’d throw a party just to celebrate you smiling at him  
“Great News Everybody: Jeon Wonwoo Is Beautiful Today”

 

 **soonyoung  
**LMAO TRUE

 

 **wonwoo  
**shut up

 

 **jun**  
it’s sweet  
go and have some superb fuckin sex you funky little romantics

 

 **soonyoung**  
wonwoo i hope u have the BEST time getting that dick  
or giving it  
or doing whatever non-penetrative activity makes u both feel good thats safe sane and consensual i support your kinks

 

 **wonwoo  
**thank you to jun and jun only

 

 **jihoon  
**ok soonyoung that’s enough out of you

 

 **jun  
**@ wonwoo i mean this in a completely homosexual way u deserve the absolute world bro

 

 **soonyoung  
**what jihoonie? are you gonna stop me? :)

 

 **jun**  
wtf why the emoji  
WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN

 

 **soonyoung  
**jihoon has informed me that we are about to have sex goodbye see you in 48 hrs!!!!!

 

 **jun  
**CAN YALL JUST FUCK NEXT TIME WITHOUT MAKING A PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT TF U THINK THIS IS

 

 

\-----

 

  

Byeol takes to Mingyu’s state of all-but-moved-in like he’s been here all along, his presence a fixed constant from the first day Wonwoo brought him home.

Nothing much has changed in that regard. 

Mingyu still spoils him by cooking him prime cuts of meat, buying him an abundant amount of toys, and taking him out on walks when Wonwoo’s too busy with work to make it home in time. He spends most of his time at home cuddling or playing with Byeol. 

Other than Soojin, Mingyu is Byeol’s favourite person in the world and that’s fine with Wonwoo. Really. He gets it.

Mingyu’s his favourite person, too.

Saturday Park Day is now a whole family event. Byeol wakes them up at seven o’clock sharp but only Mingyu will drag himself out of bed to stock up his dry food because he’s _weak_ and no amount of Wonwoo frowning and disapproving has compelled him to stop. And then after lunch, Byeol will dance around Mingyu, pestering him and eating up his attention like he’s been starved of it for days before Mingyu caves and convinces Wonwoo to drop whatever he’s doing to take Byeol on his walk. 

Sometimes, when the park is quieter and no one’s around to see, Wonwoo will hold Mingyu’s hand, and not to sound like a 12-year-old kid having his first ever romantic encounter with the person he’s had a crush on all year, but it’s the best part of his week.

 

 

\-----

 

 

 **mingyu** **♥** ** >>>  ** **♥** **wonwoo-yah** **♥**  
h yuin FG  
m dur jgnk  
nd the DOor wont  openㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ  
im cold hyungn g ㅠㅠ  
but i lvoe u and it mkaes me feejl wasrm  
hreart fluttrering ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

 

 

Wonwoo finds Mingyu outside of their apartment building, crouched in a ball on ground outside the door at 2:37AM freezing his ass off because he can’t remember the passcode in his current state of intoxication. Wonwoo would say that forgetting the passcode to your own apartment despite living here for over a year now ranks about an eight on the 1-10 scale of Exactly How Insanely Drunk Are You Right Now.

Mingyu makes a whining sound, like a puppy, and flies up into Wonwoo’s arms when he sees him standing in front of him.

“Hyung,” he sobs, his hands and face are frostbite cold, which is concerning to say the least. But he seems intact, still has his phone on him, and he’s still got all the pieces of clothing (scarf, coat, beanie, watch) that he left with this morning so Wonwoo can’t complain.

Mingyu smells like soju and barbecue but Wonwoo lets him bury his face in his shoulder, because he is a whipped ass man and this is the love of his life, his light and stars and the silver lining of the moon when he’s feeling sentimental and disgusting —

Mingyu bends over and promptly throws up all over Wonwoo’s shoes.

It’s not the first or last time this is going to happen.

Mingyu’s not a heavy drinker, but working in such a high-pressure environment means that he and his co-workers are all but required go _all out_ on their rare days off. And boy do paramedics know how to party. Their endless days and nights of dealing with Seoul’s drunken troublemakers and scoundrels have only hardened them against the worst of alcohol’s side effects and made them nearly invulnerable to the more dangerous consequences of drinking. 

The last time Mingyu had drunk this much at a work event, he’d broken into Wonwoo’s house for the first time to play with Byeol. 

Really, Wonwoo owes these nights of drunken chaos and pandemonium everything. 

“Wonwoo, I’m sorry,” Mingyu says, moping to himself, after Wonwoo’s dragged them both into the apartment and has managed to clean up most of the damage done to his precious sneakers.

“ _Baby_ ,” Mingyu says.

“Fellow tenant,” Wonwoo replies, tossing Mingyu’s wet towel over his head so he can finish drying his hair. 

Mingyu gives a muffled grunt, shaking the towel off his head and into his hands like a wet Byeol. “Don’t be mad at me,” he mumbles despondently. “ _Please_.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“You _sound_ mad.”

“I’m tired, Mingyu. It’s three in the morning and my boyfriend threw up on my favourite sneakers and then nearly killed himself trying to take a shower.”

“I’m _sorry_ , I’m sorry! How was I s’pposed t’ know I’d _slip_? Everything was wet ‘nd slippery, and then the shampoo attacked my eyes —” 

Wonwoo runs his fingers through his own still-damp hair. Mingyu had let out a blood-curdling scream from the midst of his shower and Wonwoo’s heart had nearly flung itself out of his chest as he’d ran to see what happened. After he’d been drenched in the process of getting Mingyu up from where he was sprawled on the floor of the shower, and cleaning the shampoo out of Mingyu’s eyes, there was no point not getting in and finishing the job himself. 

So, he’d taken his second shower of the night and helped Mingyu wash his hair, helped him dry off and get dressed without slamming his head against any hard surfaces. Taking care of a drunk Mingyu is very much like taking care of an extremely large, extremely drunk baby. He’s terrible at forming full sentences and has trouble understanding anything other than simple instructions.

Mingyu frowns at him when he goes to take a seat in one of the single armchairs instead of on the couch beside him. He pouts, folding his arms across his chest, the sleeves of Wonwoo’s sweater flopping over his fingers (he’d insisted on wearing one of Wonwoo’s to bed).

“My head hurts,” Mingyu whines softly, his eyes big and cute and absolutely _not_ devastating at all.

“Drink your water.”

Mingyu ignores this piece of sound, practical advice, huffing to himself and patting at the ends of his hair with his towel more aggressively. He’s sobered up now, meaning his twilight hour clarity has begun to lay the groundwork for the screaming hangover he’ll have in the morning. 

“Finish that glass and then come to bed. You’re going to have an even worse headache when you wake up. I’ll make you hangover soup tomorrow.” 

Wonwoo moves to stand but Mingyu straightens smoothly from the couch and slides onto his lap, swinging his legs around either side of him before he can get to his feet. It’s all very quick and stunningly graceful for someone who nearly gave himself a concussion trying to wash his hair moments earlier.

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo says, voice tense and low. Mingyu’s wearing nothing but his pilfered sweater (a size too small and far too tight around the chest) and a pair of very small boxer briefs; Wonwoo can feel the heat of his thighs through the single layer of his pyjama pants.

“What are you doing?”

Mingyu wraps his arms around Wonwoo’s neck and starts playing lightly with his hair.

“You’re so _pretty_ , hyung. You’re so kind, and sweet.” Mingyu breathes as he cards his fingers through Wonwoo’s hair, brushes his fingers softly at the back of Wonwoo’s neck. “ _I’m so lucky_.”

And what is Wonwoo supposed to do but let him?

 _What is he supposed to do_ when Mingyu looks at him like this, soft-eyed and dazed like he’s in disbelief that he gets to call Wonwoo _his_.

“Mingyu…”

“You never call me any nicknames,” Mingyu protests, apropos of nothing, his bottom lip hovering on the precipice of a pout. “Never _baby_ or honey, or even _darling_.”

“I —” Wonwoo’s gaze shutters.

Mingyu’s right, he’s usually the one using the pet names and endearments. Wonwoo doesn’t have any particular feelings about it. (Okay, _that’s_ a lie. He likes it. He loves it.) But it had never occurred to him that it might bother Mingyu that Wonwoo didn’t reciprocate his habit.

“I didn’t know you wanted me to.” Wonwoo lowers his head a fraction so he can lock eyes with Mingyu. It’s never been a habit for him in his past relationships, but that’s what communicating is for. He’s still learning all these new things about Mingyu and what he likes and what he wants from the person who loves him.

It’s such a simple request; who is Wonwoo to deny him of it?

“ _Baby_ ,” Wonwoo says. “My big, sweet clumsy disaster baby.”

“Okay, Mr. Bare Minimum.” Mingyu huffs playfully. “And did you _have_ to add the last bit?” 

Wonwoo takes Mingyu’s face into his hands and brushes his nose softly against Mingyu’s nose in a gesture that aches with fondness.

“ _Jagiya_.”

Mingyu all but melts under him, against him, the tension in his body keeping him together and upright dissolving. He tilts his face up, a wordless demand for a kiss.

Wonwoo obliges, because of course he does, _he always will_. He kisses Mingyu, the brush of their lips warm and soft, the taste of Mingyu lost beneath the peppermint crush of his toothpaste. Mingyu curls his arms around Wonwoo’s shoulders, pressing closer as Wonwoo shifts his own to wrap around Mingyu’s waist. 

It’s a sweet, gentle kiss. A sunlit, midday kind of kiss, for lazy afternoons and summertime. 

The longer they kiss however, the more apparent it becomes that this isn’t enough. Because it’s winter, and it’s been forty-six days since they got together. Forty-six days of not being able to do anything but kiss and touch each other with tempting brushes of skin and only the barest suggestion of more, at best curling their hands around each other and getting each other off. Because it’s winter and Wonwoo wants nothing more than to feel the heat of Mingyu against him, inside him, around him, everywhere that he can touch and taste and get his mouth and hands on.

Wonwoo mouths kisses along Mingyu’s jaw, tilting his head so he can suck at his earlobe, trace the outline of Mingyu’s ear with his tongue. He goes lower, licking at Mingyu’s pulse point just to feel the slight thump of Mingyu’s blood beneath his skin. He kisses it, the graze of his teeth drawing a soft moan from Mingyu.

“Wonwoo,” Mingyu gasps when Wonwoo sucks against the outline of teeth he’s left there. He strokes his thumb up along Wonwoo’s neck, but even this soft, reassuring motion only makes the want in Wonwoo’s veins burn higher. 

“ _Wonwoo_.” Mingyu mumbles weakly, as Wonwoo licks at his exposed collarbone, presses a kiss at the end and then another at the juncture of his shoulder and neck.

“Wonwoo, we can’t.”

Wonwoo can hear the strain in Mingyu’s voice, he can hear it, but the desire flooding his head, tinting his vision with want and need and _oh, god, please just this once_ , is making it hard to listen. He can feel the outline of Mingyu through his tiny little briefs pressing up against his own hardness, brushing against him every time he so much as shifts a muscle. 

“Why? _Why not_ , _sweetheart?_ ” 

Mingyu visibly shudders, and Wonwoo almost feels bad for doing this to him. For pushing him to the edge and keeping him here, trembling, so clearly desperate for more but incapable of acting on it. Wonwoo has been here, _at this edge_ , every day since he kissed Mingyu and told him he couldn’t imagine his life without him in it. His life _with_ Mingyu in it has brought more happiness and joy and silver linings than he’s ever had in recent memory; it’s brought a proportionate hell of frustration and helplessness.

He jacks off in the shower thinking about Mingyu’s strangely smaller-than-expected hands but his thick fingers and how his hands always feel warm to the touch, fantasising about the warmth of Mingyu’s mouth when he’s kissing him and what it’d be like to wring pleasure from it as he takes him into his mouth, or sucks at the soft part of his inner thigh, to taste the salt and sweat of him on his tongue. He dreams about what it’d be like to fuck Mingyu, or be fucked by Mingyu, and wakes up harder than he’s ever been since he was a teenager in Changwon waking up before dawn to wash his own sheets. 

All this culminating in an unending purgatory — one foot in heaven, the euphoria of being with Mingyu, and one foot in hell, the torment and suffering of not being able to be _with_ him.

Mingyu sucks in an unsteady breath, eyes wide and exuding deer-in-the-headlights energy as if he hadn’t planted himself here on Wonwoo’s lap like a nation marking their sovereign territory on the moon.

“I — it hasn’t been ten weeks yet.”

Wonwoo kisses Mingyu’s jaw, and then his lips, licking into his mouth like he’s trying to steal the words from his tongue with a magician’s sleight-of-hand. 

“Wonwoo,” Mingyu tears away reluctantly, panting slightly against Wonwoo’s lips. 

A wayward flicker of frustration surges through Wonwoo, his gaze fixed and unwavering on Mingyu’s, sharpens a little. 

“Why doesn’t this ever seem to bother you as much as it bothers me?”

Mingyu stares, silent, open-mouthed, disbelief bleeding across his face. He’s always so _expressive_ , his face betraying every emotion, every thought, that crosses his mind. Even the ones he doesn’t know he’s thinking.  

“You think this isn’t — isn’t _hard_ for me?”

Mingyu clenches his jaw, gaze dropping as he curls his hands into fists. His brow tenses like a pulled stitch, his mouth falling open with everything he doesn’t even know how to begin putting into words: 

“I want — I want you _so bad_ , I want to kiss every part of you so much that I — I think I’m gonna lose my mind sometimes.”

Mingyu exhales, his breath quivering with the effort it takes to not _show Wonwoo_ how much he means what he’s saying.

“I’ve never wanted anyone more in my life,” Mingyu says, his voice hitching into a ragged, breathless laugh. “I wanted you since the first moment I saw you in that café, in that club when I thought I’d broken your nose and was devastated thinking I’d broken the face of the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.” 

It’s Wonwoo’s turn to go breathless now, his pulse quickening when Mingyu lifts his gaze and it’s like he’s been stripped raw of all the filter and pretence and skin, nothing but bare hunger and desire. 

“I don’t want to _break_ you again just because I couldn’t wait.” 

Mingyu swallows. “I’d wait even longer, twice as long, ten times as long, because it’s you. Because it would be worth it.” 

Wonwoo knows he means it, too. That’s the worst part of all this. It’s no one’s fault that he was shot in the line of duty before they could get their shit together and admit their feelings out loud. But he feels guilty, nonetheless, for burdening Mingyu with this. He’s been nothing but patient and understanding, and worse still, acting like Wonwoo’s private in-home nurse, checking and redressing his wounds. All the while blushing every time he sees Wonwoo’s bare chest as if they’re not _boyfriends_.

By this stage of a two-month relationship, Mingyu shouldn’t be going red every time he sees a glimpse of Wonwoo’s skin. It’s like they’re fucking stuck in a Joseon Dynasty period drama. 

“You’re killing me. Do you know that?” Wonwoo brushes his fingertips across the curve of Mingyu’s cheeks. “You’re physically killing me. Every time you say something like that. I feel like my body is literally going to combust from how turned on I am.”

Mingyu giggles, one of those tiny soft laughs that sound like if Tinkerbell’s fairy dust had a sound effect. 

“I’m worth it.”

“Yes, baby,” Wonwoo whispers, leaning forwards to cup Mingyu’s cheeks and kiss the laughter from his lips. “You are.”

 

  

\-----

 

  

D-Day falls on a Friday. Finally, the universe smiling down upon them and giving them this single moment of much-deserved grace.

It’s three days after Valentine’s Day, meaning they don’t have to fight for a reservation at a nice restaurant in Apgujeong that’s only a twenty-minute drive from their apartment. Wonwoo’s left them an hour window to get dressed in case Mingyu panicks at the last second and has to go through multiple outfit changes and hairstyles.

Mingyu’s ready with five minutes to spare, sitting unusually quietly and promptly on the couch playing with Byeol when Wonwoo comes out from the bedroom. 

When Mingyu stands, Wonwoo feels the air leave his mouth, his lungs, the _room_. 

Half of his hair is swept back from his forehead, the other half curls down over his left eyebrow, styled in his signature artless comma like he’d run his hand through his hair and it’d simply settled that way, roguish and effortlessly handsome. He’s wearing a simple black blazer, black pants, _and absolutely nothing_ underneath the blazer. Instead of a shirt, the cut of the blazer ends in a v at the middle of his sternum revealing a diamond drop necklace gleaming faintly everywhere it catches the light. There’s a touch of liner following the outer edge of Mingyu’s eyes, drawing focus to make them seem bigger and sharper, the gleam of his eyes brighter.

Wonwoo suddenly feels very, very underdressed. And very worried. 

Mingyu lets out a soft _wow_ , giving Wonwoo his own onceover. Wonwoo’s wearing a long navy coat and a white turtleneck, he’s not like Mingyu who’s immune to the weather because “Thots don’t get cold, hyung” — the circumstances are barely comparable.

Mingyu looks stunned, _shaken_ , nonetheless when he puts Byeol down and comes over to stand in front of Wonwoo.

“You look… _amazing_. Your hair —”

That’s the one point Wonwoo _will_ concede because he’d gone to a hair salon especially for tonight after his hospital appointment and Mingyu’s never seen him like this. He’d felt self-conscious and ridiculous sitting in the salon chair, having his hair professionally permed just for a date that isn’t even a first date, worrying that it’d seem like he was trying _too hard_ and what if Mingyu preferred him with straight hair? But seeing Mingyu’s reaction as he takes him and the soft, wavy hair framing his face and curling delicately at the base of his neck, Wonwoo decides that the surprise was worth it.

“It’s — _hyung_. You look so…” Mingyu’s voice tails off and his hand rises like he’s thinking of touching Wonwoo’s hair before he stops himself mid-movement, mesmerised. “ _Wow._ ” 

“Thanks. I should be saying that to _you_ , though.” Wonwoo smiles, his eyes brightening. “You really… went all out.” 

Mingyu’s hand twitches towards his throat and the glittering necklace there as he smiles, too, a little bashful. “Is it — is it too much, you think?” 

“It’s stunning. _You’re_ stunning.”

Mingyu beams, his whole face lighting up with warmth, lantern-like as if its emanating from somewhere within him. “Thanks, hyung. Now, c’mon! Let’s go, I’m starving.”

He holds out his hand for Wonwoo to take, and Wonwoo laces his fingers through Mingyu’s and holds on tight as Mingyu tugs him out the door.

 

 

\-----

 

  

On their very first date (their first _real_ date and not the many almost-sort of-maybe one day-pretend dates that Mingyu had been sneakily taking him on for as long as they’d known each other. Which, in retrospect, were far too obvious and consistently frequent for Wonwoo not to notice) Mingyu took Wonwoo to his favourite restaurant in the city. It was beautiful and faultlessly picturesque, the atmosphere softly lit by candles and stars, and he’d kissed him goodbye at the door of Wonwoo’s apartment.

(“Mingyu, we don’t have to literally kiss at the door. We can do it inside.”

“It’s _romantic_ , hyung. C’mon, why not?”

“It’s cold out here, for one. For another, we have an audience.”

Mingyu’s mouth falls open, and he whirls sharply on his heel to find two sets of big eyes blinking up at them in curiosity.

At the sound of their mother calling for them, the kids from 3B giggle and disappear, fleeing back into their house but by the time Mingyu turns around, blushing heavily and at a loss for words, the moment is gone.

“Fine,” Mingyu sighs, shoulders sinking. “I guess we can just… do it inside.”

Wonwoo lets out a little huff of laughter, taking Mingyu’s hand in his and pulling him in with his other arm so they’re chest to chest. “You were gonna give up just like that?”

Mingyu pouts, as he was usually wont to do in any and all situations despite his cuteness not being required. “Let’s just go inside. It’s not that big a deal, whatever.”

“Where would the _romance_ be in that?” Wonwoo says, smile curving at his lips as he presses up on his tip toes, leaning slowly in.) 

It was pretty damn amazing, as far as first date kisses go. 

Their second date, Mingyu took them to an art gallery, and they sat outside in the shade beneath the sun at a nearby café with coffee and dessert as they talked for hours about post-impressionist art.

They’ve been to movies, they’ve done the walks through the park, the midnight feasts at their local pojangmacha, they’ve done most of the classic, clichéd things young couples do. The truth is, going on dates with Mingyu is never really like _going on a date_. Wonwoo knows him too well, their jokes are too private and elaborate; all the stories Mingyu could tell to capture his interest and spark his imagination over dinner and wine are stories they tell each other breakfast in the mornings or at lunch when Wonwoo swings by Severance and Mingyu just so happens to be free. 

It’s more like hanging out with his best friend, like spending time with someone he’s known his entire life, than _dating_.

Sometimes, Wonwoo suspects Mingyu’s more in love with the idea and the aesthetic of the thrilling, whirlwind rose-tinted first weeks of being in a relationship than actually _going_ on the dates themselves. He’s been thinking about how to subtly let Mingyu know that he doesn’t have to go above and beyond every single time because Wonwoo would honestly be content with takeout and a movie on the couch. But Mingyu’s all about expensive pinot noir and restaurants with high rise views of the glittering cityscape below and lavish, devastatingly thoughtful gifts that Wonwoo could never possibly repay.

He wants every date to be _memorable_ and exciting and new, like he’s afraid that if he doesn’t impress Wonwoo with something fun and exhilarating every time they go out Wonwoo will suddenly decide he doesn’t want to date him anymore. It makes Wonwoo wonder about his past relationships, and how those men and women treated Mingyu and acted around him, for him to be this anxious to please. It’s as if he’s waiting for Wonwoo to give the word, to say _jump_ so he can ask _how high?_  

This is their eighth date — not counting the time Mingyu’s pager went off in the first hour and he’d had to leave Wonwoo to finish an extravagant eight course omakase menu for two people — and Mingyu’s fidgeting and clearly on edge. 

He keeps twitching his fingers and putting them in his lap only to curl them on top of the table again. Wonwoo can tell he’s trying very hard not to bite at his nails.

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo says, after the waiter has refilled their wine glasses.

“Mm?” Mingyu says, head jerking up distractedly.

“Are you okay?” Wonwoo asks, voice measured and gentle. So as not to spook him.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” Mingyu replies, far too quickly. “We’re… it’s. Y’know… _tonight_. I’m great! I’m fantastic.”

“Okay.” Wonwoo reassures. “I’m just asking. It’s okay if you… We don’t have to do all this.”

Mingyu had glanced away to fiddle with his napkin but his head whips up all of a sudden, his eyes big and wide and _electric_ with something like panic. 

“Wh —” Mingyu stutters. “Why wouldn’t we… _I thought_ — don’t you want to?” 

His voice lilts, unsteady, wavering on some edge he’s pushed himself to without Wonwoo even realising it. Wonwoo frowns.

“I just meant… This restaurant. The dinner. We don’t have to do all this.”

Mingyu’s face falls, all the light snuffed out, and Wonwoo scrambles to fix it, to say something that’ll make it stop.

“I just want to spend time with you.”

“I thought you _wanted_ to go out tonight, you said dinner would be perfect.” Mingyu says, words sinking quickly into the thick, petty tone he uses when they’re about to descend into an argument (they haven’t had many; only a few small, short-lived disagreements here and there — it’s painfully ordinary, boring domestic couple stuff). “We picked _Japanese_ because it’s your favourite.”

Wonwoo doesn’t want to fight; Mingyu’s misunderstanding him, his thoughts racing ahead of his mouth ( _his heart_ ), he just needs to make him listen. 

“And I’m grateful. I love going out to dinner with you, but it doesn’t matter to me what we do or where we go, what matters to me is that it’s with _you_.” Wonwoo’s brow furrows but it’s a shadow of the knot pulling tight around his throat and in his chest. His voice is softer, gentler, when he speaks again. 

“You know that right?”

“I’m not stupid, _yes_ , I know,” Mingyu mumbles, still avoiding eye contact.

“Then you also know that I love you. And that whatever’s bothering you, you can talk to me about it.” 

Mingyu bites at his lip, fidgets for a moment and looks down at his hands with greater interest than he’s looked at Wonwoo with this entire night. Not a great start, but Wonwoo’s patient. It takes almost a minute for Mingyu to finally speak, and when he does, at last, his voice is a muffled, shameful whisper. 

“What if it’s bad.” 

Wonwoo arches his brows a little, wordless but encouraging. 

“ _What if it’s bad._ ” Mingyu says, only the slightest bit louder, gaze still fixed to the surface of the table. 

“What if _what’s_ bad?” 

“Y’know… like. What if we get to the end of the date and we’re home and it’s just. It sucks, and I’m _bad_.”

“I don’t understand, Mingyu… what are you talking about?”

“The _sex_!” Mingyu snaps, at a volume loud enough for not only Wonwoo to hear but the people around them at nearby tables. Wonwoo spares a glance around them and bows his head quickly at as many people as he can make eye contact with, almost like he’s having a very contained seizure. Mingyu’s too busy feeling sorry for himself about god knows what to notice or to care.

“What if I’m really bad at it,” he mumbles, expression torn between frantic and bleak.

“How could you possibly be bad at it?” Wonwoo says, incredulous. 

“I don’t know... what if it’s, like… We’ve waited for so long and built it up so much that I’m just… it’s gonna be a letdown.” 

God, this idiot man of his. 

“Mingyu, my sweet, beautiful sunflower. Idiot love of my life.” 

“Yah!” Mingyu says, crestfallen and with no heat to it whatsoever.

“Light of my skies,” Wonwoo continues, unperturbed. “You stupid, handsome fool. You could _never_ be a letdown. Not to me.”

Wonwoo takes Mingyu’s hand, uncurls it from the fist he has it wound so tightly in, and brings it up to his lips. He brushes a kiss, the softest graze of his lips, against Mingyu’s knuckles. It’s their thing. A gesture of fondness and affection, but also affirmation. A way to let the other person know without doubt or shade of uncertainty that they _mean it_. 

“I’ve been waiting for this for fifty-seven days now — longer still if we’re being honest. But I’d wait five hundred more if you don’t feel ready tonight.”

“I didn’t say _that_ ,” Mingyu cuts in, pink to the tips of his ears. “I’m _ready_ , I’m just. Nervous. I still _want_ to.” 

“Then let’s get out of here.” There’s a smile curving at the edges of Wonwoo’s mouth, the mischief in the crooked lilt of it sparking lightning in his eyes, infectious and dazzling. 

“ _What_?”

“I mean it. Let’s get out of here.” 

“We can’t!” Mingyu squeaks, bewildered by the mere suggestion. “We have a _reservation_. It takes weeks just to get a booking here.” 

“Why not?” Wonwoo’s eyes gleam in the half-shadows of the low-lit restaurant, glowing brighter than the candles decorating the table. “It’ll be romantic. We’ll take the wine with us.” 

Wonwoo curls his hand around Mingyu’s, and he feels the exact moment the fight goes out in him.

“Fuck.” Mingyu mutters. “Okay. _Alright._ I — let’s go, then.”

Wonwoo stands first and slips on his coat before darting around to Mingyu’s side of the table to help him into his. Mingyu gives him an odd, strained look when Wonwoo’s hand brushes against his shoulders in the process. Wonwoo pauses to grab the wine bottle and when he moves to pass it to Mingyu, their fingers graze against each other, the cold of his hands igniting against the heat of Mingyu’s cancelling out in perfect balance. Thermodynamic equilibrium.

Mingyu snatches his hand back — clutched tightly around the neck of the wine bottle; small mercies — like he’s been burned, and turns before Wonwoo can catch a glimpse of his face. 

He breathes out, hunching his shoulders. “C’mon, hyung, this was your idea.”

“Coming, darling.” 

Mingyu swats at him with his other hand but lets Wonwoo catch it in his grip and tangle their fingers together, their palms alighting with static and heat.

“Don’t call me that, you just want me for my body.”

“Of _course_ I want you for your body, baby.” Wonwoo says, voice low and husky like one of those cheesy, exaggerated lead heartthrobs in those dramas. “I’ve been _yearning_ for you. Haven’t you seen me yearning?”

Mingyu snorts, but there’s a smile twitching at his lips. “God. _Please._ Don’t use The Voice either. Or else we’re going to be arrested for public indecency _and_ dining and dashing.” 

“I paid the bill in full before we sat down.” Wonwoo breaks out into a smug, triumphant grin as Mingyu chokes.

“You _planned_ this?” The shock sends his voice shooting up several octaves.

“You’re always accusing me of not being romantic or spontaneous enough.” Wonwoo waits until they’ve stepped out of the restaurant and rounded the corner to the elevators to pull Mingyu into his orbit, hands circling the arc of his hips, the gravity of him utterly irresistible. “Is this spur-of-the-moment enough for you?”

“Y – Yeah.” Mingyu visibly swallows, shrinking in on himself. “I guess so.”

“Good. Because we’re just getting started.”

Mingyu’s eyes widen, round and panicked. “What — _what’s that supposed to mean?_ ” 

The door to the elevator slides open. 

“You’ll see.” Wonwoo winks, stepping into the elevator. Behind him, Mingyu looks like he’s lost the ability to breathe. 

“Wonwoo. What the _fuck_.” He hisses, stumbling after him just as the doors begin to slide shut again.

 

 

\-----

 

 

“Just so you know, I don’t put out till the _ninth_ date,” Mingyu says, brushing past Wonwoo before he’s even finished pulling the key out of the door. 

“Oh? Really.” Wonwoo drawls, nudging the door shut and sauntering in after him. “Guess I’ll just have to get myself off all alone tonight while you sleep down the hallway.” 

“I’m _kidding_.” Mingyu says, sounding a little worried that Wonwoo might think he’s not kidding. 

Wonwoo slips off his coat and tosses it across the back of the couch as he walks past it. “Have fun with Byeol.”

“ _Hyung._ ” Mingyu struggles out of his own coat and dashes after him. Byeol barks an affronted hello at the lack of acknowledgement. “Yes, _hi_ , Byeol. I’m sorry I can’t play right now, I’m — _very busy_.”

“No, he’s not. Byeollie-yah, Mingyu’s going to be snuggling with you tonight.” 

Mingyu grits his teeth, shooting Wonwoo a look before shoving him into the bedroom. “Okay, goodnight, buddy. Love you. See you in the morning!” The door’s slammed shut before he’s even finished speaking. Mingyu whirls and presses his back up against the door, eyes slipping shut in relief. When he opens his eyes, its with a startled yelp and he nearly falls over himself despite standing with his back against a wall. 

“You okay there?” 

Mingyu presses a hand to his chest, expression torn between petrified and scandalised. “Why are you — where did your _shirt_ go?”

“I took it off.” Wonwoo replies evenly, matter-of-fact tone laced with wry amusement.

Mingyu, whose skin is usually the shade of sun-soaked honey and molten gold, has gone stark white.

“You’ve seen me naked before. We’ve taken showers together.”

“ _But this is — !_ ” Mingyu gesticulates wildly in Wonwoo’s direction. “This is _different_.”

Wonwoo looks at him for a second in complete silence, and then tilts his chin up.

“C’mere.”

Mingyu presses his lips together, swallows nervously, and then steps away from the door. When he’s close enough to touch, Wonwoo takes his face into his palm, fingers sliding to cup Mingyu’s jaw as his other hand curves around Mingyu’s waist. He’s wanted this for so long it feels surreal to be holding him like this now, knowing that every touch is weighted with intention, laced with promise that’ll lead to something more. It isn’t that Wonwoo isn’t nervous, too, it’s just that his body has hovered for so long on this knife’s edge between need and anticipation he’s forgotten what it feels like not to be half-delirious with desire. 

“I’m going to kiss you now,” he whispers, his gaze, the blue-black of midnight, locked on Mingyu’s like he wants to sear the look on his face, right now, in this moment, to the insides of his mind. He guides Mingyu’s face down towards his so he can brush his lips across Mingyu’s. His eyes flutter shut as Wonwoo kisses at his bottom lip, sweet and tender, kisses him like a serenade, every note and movement composed to the soft beat of hunger. 

Wonwoo kisses his neck, down the column of his throat where he can feel his pulse throbbing like an echo of his own heartbeat. He kisses the wing of his collarbone, the mid point of his sternum outlined by the gleam of his lariat necklace and Mingyu lets out a gasp, obscene, torn from him like profanity, or prayer. Mingyu’s fingers move to his buttons, to undo them, and they’re trembling as he fumbles to get a steady grip — he’s always been impatient about the things he wants the most, but his stubbornness, his _impulsiveness_ heats like forged metal beneath fire to a sharp point, a sweet, urgent desperation under Wonwoo’s attention.

“Baby.” Wonwoo breathes, his nose grazing against the soft skin beneath Mingyu’s ear just to feel him shiver. “You’re trembling.”

The noise Mingyu lets slip is high and sharp, half-grumble, half-whimper. The long V of exposed skin, gilded by sun-kissed warmth, tempts as he shifts on his feet, glimpses of defined muscle slipping from bespoke silk. Wonwoo gathers Mingyu’s warm, calloused hands in his and brushes them easily, carelessly, out of the way. 

“Let me.” 

He traces the outline of the first button with a fingertip, eyeing Mingyu as he stiffens, spine going ramrod-straight. Wonwoo flattens his hand and smooths his palm up over the edge of Mingyu’s lapel, sliding up across his skin, so warm and heated beneath his cool touch. Mingyu’s always run hot, but the temperature of his skin feels like he’s running a fever, all from some kisses and light teasing. Wonwoo undoes the button, letting his fingers drag along Mingyu’s skin as he presses an open-mouthed kiss to his throat, sucking softly at the curve where his neck meets his shoulder. 

It’s a strip tease in reverse; Wonwoo toying with Mingyu and his state of undress to _his_ undoing. He traces down the center of Mingyu’s chest between his pecs and farther still, until he’s reached the second button and where it starts in the middle of his abdominal muscles. 

Wonwoo’s always loved Mingyu’s body. He’s never cared much for rippling washboard abs and well-muscled men but it’d be a lie to say that the image of Mingyu stark naked and completely bare standing in the middle of living room hasn’t haunted him many a day and tormented night. These are muscles he’s built over the years of working as a firefighter and a paramedic and out of personal discipline. But the fact that Mingyu has doubled the amount of time he spends at the gym (working out frustrations and Wonwoo-related stress) since they got together means that, in a certain roundabout way, this is _for him_. All of this, for him.

He circles the pad of his finger around one of Mingyu’s nipples, blowing on his ear at the same time, and Mingyu moans, gripping tighter at Wonwoo’s waist and neck.

Wonwoo smiles, pleased even though Mingyu can’t see his face, and releases him from his second button, stroking encouragingly against the ridges of taut muscle stretching across Mingyu’s stomach. 

Mingyu wore this blazer, with this dainty piece of jewellery dangling down his chest, because he knew it would drive Wonwoo out of his mind. There’s the faintest gleam and shimmer of something like the highlighter Mingyu uses on his cheek sometimes when he dolls himself up to go out catching the light along his collarbones and down his décolletage. His cologne, the scent of sandalwood, cardamom and ambrosia, coats his golden skin. Mingyu adores the finer things in life, adores making _himself_ exquisite in gilded luxury and opulence. 

It’s breathtaking, mesmerising — an affront on all of Wonwoo’s senses. He breathes him in and can taste clear water and cedar, the heat and sweetness of spice and violets on his tongue. 

He kisses a line of demarcation down Mingyu’s chest, like an ancient archaeologist laying claim to each new and precious revelation uncovered with greed and meteoric ambition. Mingyu’s head tips backwards with a gasp as he teases his nipple with the graze of his tongue. He takes it into his mouth, sucking softly, and then with slighter, more focused, pressure. Mingyu’s grip on Wonwoo tightens, the noise he makes rising in pitch and desperation as Wonwoo lets the hint of teeth brush against his nipple. Mingyu shakes, a plea rending on the edge of his lips as Wonwoo undoes the third, and final button. 

Mingyu pulls him into another kiss, crushing their mouths together before Wonwoo can continue marking his territory across the rest of his skin now bare from the waist up. Wonwoo can feel his arousal pressing against his thigh, can _taste_ how hard he is just from the way he kisses him like he’s trying to beg and demand and threaten in the same breath.

“ _Wonwoo._ ”

His voice has the lilt of a whine but there’s a hardness to it, a vein of frustration and growling need.

Wonwoo lets Mingyu tug him to the bed, but it’s him pressing Mingyu into the sheets like flowers between the pages of a book. It’s him mouthing across Mingyu’s neck, licking at the shell of his ear, swirling his tongue across Mingyu’s nipples, keeping Mingyu’s hips pinned to the bed with his hands. When he reaches Mingyu’s pants, he makes quick work of his belt, undoing it without any of the performance and showmanship of his blazer. The only point of deviation is him sliding the belt from the loops, the tail end making a whipping sound as Wonwoo tears it from the last one and tosses it to the floor.

He’s hovering over Mingyu, his knees bracketing Mingyu’s hips, Mingyu splayed on the bed beneath him, bare chested, his pants open at the fly and blatantly straining and leaking into his black Calvin Klein briefs. It surges through Wonwoo like a thrill of adrenaline, having Mingyu underneath him, all six foot and two inches him, big and muscular and tall and yet also this sweet, pretty thing spread across his sheets. It sends a hit of pure exhilaration down his spine to know how easily Mingyu could flip them, could press him, helpless, into the bed with his strength and size. He can’t, at least not right now, because Wonwoo has him pinned with just his thighs, his gaze, his hands at his sides.

“God, you’re beautiful.” Wonwoo says, drinking him in, gaze sweeping down the length of him, savouring each drop of him like the first drops of rainwater in a drought.

Mingyu gazes back at him, long lashes going half-lidded in satisfaction, in _pleasure_ , at the praise. 

“ _You are_ , hyung,” he murmurs. His hands lift to slide into Wonwoo’s hair, fingers stroking through Wonwoo’s curls with a wordless awe. He loops one of the curls by Wonwoo’s face around his finger, tugging at it slightly and following the circumference of it to the end of the curl. “You’re so pretty with curly hair. So gorgeous.” 

Wonwoo leans into his touch, and Mingyu cards his fingers deeper through his hair, gripping at it with a sharper tug that spikes arousal deep in Wonwoo’s stomach. 

Mingyu pulls him in like this for a kiss, licking into Wonwoo’s mouth from the second their lips touch, wet and hot with all-consuming intent. For a few moments, they lose themselves just in the kissing, edging farther and farther out of the familiar territory of safe, if passionate, kisses to the filthier, dirtier drive of heat, of kissing like fucking. With the newfound freedom of knowing they can go farther, _higher_ , beyond the edge of anything they’ve ever done before, each touch and kiss is electric. Wonwoo slides his thigh between Mingyu’s legs, presses right against his cock and revels in the feeling of Mingyu grinding back against him without stopping for air or calm. 

There’s no need to stop because _this is happening_. It’s happening right now, and for the first time they can feel each other, touch each other, kiss and suck and chase the finish line till they’re so gone they forget how to stand, until they’re so tangled and wrought, wrapped up in transcendent pleasure, that their bodies mouths limbs heartbeats coalesce into one. 

When they break apart for air, chests heaving, syncopated breaths coming fast and sharp, Wonwoo takes Mingyu’s chin into his finger and thumb, brushes a hot, lingering kiss against his open mouth.

“How do you want this, sweetheart?” He asks, the endearment sugar-coating his tongue for good measure. Because this is about _them_ , but it’s also about Mingyu, about Mingyu and how long he’s waited, how good and patient and understanding he’s been all these weeks. How lovingly he’s let Wonwoo inside his heart and made it his home. 

_Sweetheart._

It’s a little alien, and so nauseatingly _fond_ , that it would make Wonwoo cringe in any other context, but Mingyu deserves this. He deserves all of this. He deserves everything that Wonwoo could possibly give him and more.

And it’s worth it simply to see Mingyu blush and squirm, fingers curling at Wonwoo’s hips like he doesn’t know what to do with his body underneath the intensity of Wonwoo’s gaze on him. The flush extends all the way down, beginning at the tips of his ears and blooming across his skin like an aurora.  

“ _What do you want, baby?_ ”

Mingyu twists a little on the spot, chest trying to angle to the side like he thinks he can still hide from Wonwoo like this.

“I — ” His breath hitches, his cheeks colouring a darker rose shade, lashes fluttering as he blinks demurely. “I — I want you inside me.”

Wonwoo kisses him, his smile and agreement seared across his lips.

He swings his leg from around Mingyu, and shuffles up to the bedside table where they’ve been stocked with lube and condoms since day 1 of getting together in preparation of today, day 57. _D-Day_. The day they’ve been holding their breaths for, waiting with a year’s worth of pent-up sexual frustration and need for final fucking release, in anticipation of.

When Wonwoo presses his hands to Mingyu’s thighs, Mingyu twitches so suddenly and sharply he startles himself. He gives a ragged huff, head flopping back against the sheets. 

“Don’t tease, hyung.” He says, voice already breathy and strained. “I don’t think I can handle it.”

“Hm,” Wonwoo hums indulgently. “I’ll think about it.”

“I’m _serious_ , Wonwoo, I ha — ” A moan slips out from his teeth, high, caught off-guard. Wonwoo smirks; his hand is wrapped around Mingyu through his briefs, the tiny layer of cotton all that separates his hand from Mingyu’s cock. 

“I’ve thought about it,” Wonwoo says, stroking softly with his hand. “And no.” 

He tightens his grip, thumb brushing over the wet patch of the fabric, right over the head of Mingyu’s cock where he’s been staining his briefs wet and soaking right through. 

“ _Wonwoo_ ,” Mingyu whimpers.

Wonwoo doesn’t answer but simply continues to stroke Mingyu through his underwear, his knees on the inside of Mingyu’s keeping him from closing his legs or twisting away from his touch. He glides his hand up to stretch across Mingyu’s abdomen, tracing the ridges of his extremely defined torso, following the V of his muscles that converge at his cock. 

“ _Hyung_ ,” Mingyu chokes out softly. “I mean it, I’m on edge as it is. I won’t last.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t go for something more risqué.” 

Mingyu blinks rapidly, eyelashes shuttering as he struggles to focus on the words coming of Wonwoo’s mouth and the motion of of his hand massaging at his dripping hard cock.

“W — what?”

“Your panties. I thought you’d be saving them especially for tonight.”

Mingyu exhales sharply, glancing down at Wonwoo impatiently.

“I didn’t want to go _over_ — ha, _ngh.._ ” Wonwoo had twisted his wrist while pressing his thumb into Mingyu’s slit through the cotton of his underwear. “— _board_.”

“So, the necklace and the body highlighter?” Wonwoo enquires, tone wry and thick with teasing curiosity. 

“Fu — _fuck you_ , as if you’re complaining.”

Wonwoo tsks, shaking his head in mock disapproval. “No need to get grumpy. I appreciated those very much. _Baby._ ”

Mingyu lets out a grunt, but his thighs are shaking when Wonwoo leans down to suck and bite at the skin right above the waistband of his briefs.

“It’s a shame,” Wonwoo murmurs, sucking hard enough to leave a mark and leaving Mingyu squirming, hips twisting as he tries to give a half-hearted buck. “I wanted to ruin a pair of tiny, pretty, lace panties.” 

Mingyu shudders, a full-bodied shiver that ripples down his spine, the tip of his cock giving a weak, enthusiastic twitch in Wonwoo’s grip.

“Next time.”

He sounds so strung out when he says it, breath an inch from a moan or a shudder, that Wonwoo takes pity on him and finally goes about properly helping him out of his pants. He tugs Mingyu’s pants and underwear down, tossing both to the ground. Mingyu’s watching him, eyes dark and heavy with arousal, and it’s a testament to how enthralling he is that Wonwoo can bear to tear his eyes away from his cock, thick and hard and so pretty where it’s curving up from between his thighs.

“So beautiful,” Wonwoo reiterates, because it’s true, and Mingyu likes to hear it. “The prettiest. With the prettiest everything.” 

He opens the lube and coats his palm before taking Mingyu’s cock into his hand, sliding his hand down the length of it and then back up again. As Wonwoo strokes him in his hand, Mingyu begins to drip down his hand, the excess of precum leaking from his tip slicking down his fingers. He always tends to leak a lot in bed, but it’s not something Wonwoo’s ever been able to fully appreciate until now, as he’s putting his mouth on Mingyu and tasting him on his tongue. Wonwoo’s sucked Mingyu off before, this isn’t the first time for _that_ , but it’s different to know that this is merely the prelude, the opening movement. That, and the knowledge that the end goal of taking him into his mouth and sucking at his head, tongue wrapping around the curve of him, isn’t to make him come. Not yet, anyway.

Wonwoo sucks Mingyu’s cock into his mouth, the first inch brushing past his open lips, the slide of him slick with the saliva coating him and the layer of lube from Wonwoo’s hand. Mingyu groans as Wonwoo takes him deeper, sucks harder with the ring of his lips tight around his cock.

He slides back, neglecting the glistening tip of his cock to lick along the vein that goes all the way down the length of him. With one hand wrapped around Mingyu, softly massaging him, fingertips stroking along the ridges of his cock, Wonwoo kisses at the skin of his inner thigh, nips at it with his teeth to hear Mingyu mewl. Another kiss, closer to Mingyu’s cock, and Wonwoo presses the flat of his tongue to the skin between Mingyu’s thigh and balls. He licks a little closer, teasing at the underside of his cock.

Mingyu grips at his hair, fingers tightening desperately in his curls, as Wonwoo mouths at his balls, takes one of them into his mouth, and then laves his tongue at the base of Mingyu’s cock until he’s as wet and glistening there as he is at his tip.

“ _Hyung_ ,” Mingyu gasps desperately.

Wonwoo busies himself with licking up a trail of precome that’s dripped down Mingyu’s cock to his balls, pressing his tongue to the sensitive underside of him again to make him twitch and let slip a muffled groan. Wonwoo bites at his inner thigh, not hard enough to leave a bruise but just enough to make clear the intention of it and Mingyu whimpers, squirms beneath his touch. 

Wonwoo’s good at sucking cock; it’s one of those skills like riding a bike that you never really forget because it stays with you, like muscle memory. It’d been a while the first time he went down on his knees for Mingyu, but he’s always had a low gag reflex and his university days of experimentation and partying and _learning_ has made him highly adept in the art. He’s never been able to let loose his full arsenal of skill and expertise till now.

When you know for a fact that you can make a man come in under five minutes just with your tongue, it’s a hard thing to hold back for months on end.

He’s holding back even now so Mingyu doesn’t come before he’s inside him, but letting him have a taste of the edge Wonwoo knows he can push him against and unravel him, piece by careful piece, is more than enough.

Mingyu’s cheeks are tinged red, his cock a darker, angry and flushed red. There’s a layer of sweat already glistening at his brow and across his chest, between the ridges of his abs. He’s the most beautiful thing Wonwoo’s ever seen, ever _touched_.

“Mingyu-yah.” 

He brushes his thumb across the arc of Mingyu’s hipbone, just watching him as he breathes, unsteady and nervous for what Wonwoo’s going to do next.

“Beautiful.” Wonwoo says, fingers moving to fist loosely around Mingyu’s cock, stroking at him with the pads of his fingertips softly, a wet, steady rhythm. “The prettiest cock I’ve ever seen.”

“ _Wonwoo_ ,” Mingyu whines, sounding bashful. Wonwoo twists his grip, and the smile on his face drops as he tips his head back in a moan.

“It’s true.”

He leans down again, hovering as he makes sure Mingyu’s gaze is locked on his as he finally takes just the head of Mingyu’s cock into his mouth, sucking softly, _purposefully_. Mingyu’s hips spasm, but Wonwoo’s ready for that, one hand anchored at his hip, keeping him pinned down as he circles his tongue around the tip of Mingyu’s cock. He laves at the edge of it, basking in how hypersensitive Mingyu is here, and then licks at the slit, letting the precome gathering from his tip drip onto his tongue.

Mingyu had been embarrassed the first time they’d ever gone farther than kissing and suggestive touches, timidly mumbling under his breath that he tends to leak a lot and gets messy in bed. He’d seemed so afraid of being judged for it until Wonwoo had looked at him, face lighting up as he kissed him quiet, reassured him that being _wet_ and _messy_ was anything _but_ a downside when it came to sex.

Wonwoo takes him deeper into his mouth, relaxing his jaw and his throat in anticipation of taking him deeper still. The tip of Mingyu’s cock brushes against the back of his throat and instead of him, it’s Mingyu that chokes.

“ _Please_ ,” Mingyu breathes, ragged and pleading. “Please, _W — Wonwoo_.”

What he’s begging for, neither of them are entirely certain but Wonwoo slides him slowly out of his mouth, gaze fixed on Mingyu’s the entire time.

“Don’t come.” He says, lips wet and kiss-swollen, bruised from sucking cock, the whisper of an order in his tone — and _there it is_ , the undercurrent feeding through every facet of their interactions in the bedroom and even sometimes out of it. The unspoken thread hanging between them, thickening in the atmosphere like charged static, like the air tensing in anticipation before a thunderstorm.

“You want to come with me inside you, don’t you?”

“Y-yeah,” Mingyu stutters, reduced to monosyllabic answers.

“Then don’t come, baby.” Wonwoo softens the command with the pet name, and with a pet of Mingyu’s thigh, an affectionate graze of his hand across Mingyu’s hip. “I know you can do it. You want to be good for me, don’t you, Mingyu?”

Mingyu whimpers, wide-eyed, biting down on his lip to cut the sound off at its knees.

“You want to be good, baby?”

Mingyu’s eyes go even bigger, and he nods his head jerkily before realising that Wonwoo wants a verbal answer and opening his mouth.

“Yes,” he says, voice small and wavering on a hair trigger, but sure.

 _Clever boy_. 

Wonwoo smiles magnanimously and leans up to sweetly brush a lock of sweat-slick hair from Mingyu’s forehead.  

“Good boy.” He cups Mingyu’s face in his hands, feels the corner of Mingyu’s smile press against his palm like the stars in the arc of the night sky. “The _best_ boy. My best boy.”

Mingyu all but preens as he tilts his face into Wonwoo’s hand, lingering in the curve of his palm to feel his touch.

Wonwoo gives him a soft caress of the cheek and then lets go of him, sliding back down onto his knees to press his lips to Mingyu’s cock. Mingyu’s wetness coats his lips, dripping from the curve of his lower lip down his chin, as he takes Mingyu into his mouth. He lets his cock rest against the dip of his tongue for a moment, sucking softly to hear Mingyu moan and feel him shaking with the urge not to press deeper (not without Wonwoo’s permission, at least).

Then, without warning or preamble, he swallows Mingyu down until the head of his cock brushes the back of his throat, and farther still, opening his throat until he reaches the base of Mingyu’s cock. 

“ _Wonwoo_.” Mingyu chokes out, voice sounding wet and desperate. 

Wonwoo hums, the vibrations of his throat rippling around the length of Mingyu’s cock, and Mingyu keens, soft and high in his throat, hips twitching slightly. Wonwoo places his hand on Mingyu’s stomach, fingers splaying as if to keep him in place with a silent command. He lets his tongue stroke softly against the side of Mingyu’s cock, licking at whatever he can reach. 

“H-hyung.” Mingyu whimpers. “Please, _please_. I ca —”

Wonwoo shifts back a little, sucking hard as he shifts his mouth back, the seal of his lips putting a ring of pressure around Mingyu as he works his throat around him.

Mingyu lets slip another a desperate little whine, his hands fisting in the sheets. Wonwoo starts bobbing his head, the wet slide of Mingyu’s precome slicking the way as he sucks Mingyu’s cock into his mouth, his throat, working up a fast, intense rhythm. Mingyu’s whines dissolve into a steady string of groans, punctuated by gasps and cries of Wonwoo’s name — he’s shy about being loud in bed until he’s too far gone to care, too blissfully distracted with being wrecked until he can’t form words.

When Wonwoo pulls back to tongue at the tip of Mingyu’s cock, Mingyu’s grip on his hair tightens urgently, a spasm surging through his hips.

“D-don’t.” Mingyu gasps, trembling as Wonwoo traces over the lines of his abdomen and wraps his tongue around the sensitive head of his cock. “I’ll come. Please, Wonwoo, _I’ll come_.”

Wonwoo tortures him just a little longer, slipping the tip of his tongue into Mingyu’s slit to taste him dripping faster and heavier than before. 

“I’m gonna come, Wonwoo,” Mingyu whines, “Please, I’m —” Wonwoo presses one last, lingering kiss to the head of his cock and pulls away.

The sight of Mingyu that greets him knocks the breath out of his lungs. He’s a wreck: hair sweat-soaked and skin glistening and flushed with it; his lips are wet and swollen from kisses, his throat and chest and hips littered with red marks already deepening in colour from Wonwoo’s teeth; and above all, the look in his eyes lighting his face up, wrecked, and still left wanting more.

Wonwoo rubs softly at the arch of his hip as he reaches for the lube. “Gonna prepare you now, okay, baby?”

Mingyu nods, movements slow and a little dazed from the number Wonwoo just did on him with his mouth.

“Tell me if I need to go slower.” Wonwoo murmurs, eyeing him solemnly. They’ve done everything but actual penetration but it’s been a while for both of them nonetheless and Mingyu had let slip early on that he stopped sleeping with other people a couple weeks after meeting Wonwoo that time in his apartment with the naked, drunken misadventure. 

Wonwoo uncaps the lube, slicking his fingers in them with a generous layer of it before closing it and setting it aside on the sheets.

He drops a kiss to Mingyu’s knee, affectionate and achingly sweet.

“So gorgeous, baby.” Wonwoo nudges Mingyu’s thighs a little farther apart, stroking gently against the soft, inner skin of his thigh. He brushes his fingertip across Mingyu’s hole, traces softly around it — not to tease, simply to admire. To adore. 

“ _Wonwoo_.” Mingyu must not see it that way, brow furrowing cutely in frustration.

“Just admiring the art,” Wonwoo says.

“Can you do that with your fingers _inside m_ —” Mingyu’s breath hitches, eyes flying open as Wonwoo pushes his finger inside him. He’s agonisingly tight, Wonwoo can tell just from the inch or so of his finger inside him. He presses his finger a little deeper, past the first knuckle. Mingyu chokes on nothing at all as he strokes the pad of his finger against his walls, brushing the tight ring of muscle around him. 

Wonwoo’s fingers are long, and slender, it’s going to take at least three for Mingyu to be able to take his cock without it aching. He’s gentle with it, _with him_ , warming and loosening him up with the soft stroking of his finger, his other hand roaming across Mingyu’s hips and stomach with light caresses.

He keeps going until he feels Mingyu growing restless, hips grinding back impatiently when he nudges his finger deeper. 

“Wonwoo.” Mingyu urges. 

“You’re so tight.” Wonwoo says, as if he hasn’t spoken, rubbing at his walls with the pad of his finger and curling it to draw a gasp from Mingyu. “So tight, and sensitive.”

“I want another one.” Wonwoo’s gaze flicks up, and Mingyu’s seconds away from pouting, his full, pink lower lip begging to be bitten and marked.

Wonwoo waits, because this is the first time Mingyu’s going to be taking a dick inside him in god knows how long, and because he’s still searching for that spot that’ll make him go weak and boneless and incapable of doing anything but moan and gasp and take whatever Wonwoo has to give him. 

“Just a little longer. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You couldn’t.” Mingyu counters, hips lifting as he attempts to press back onto Wonwoo’s finger. He’s trying to be reassuring, Wonwoo knows, but there’s a bratty edge to his voice. “ _Please_ , Wonwoo.”

Wonwoo takes his finger out of him. He reaches for the lube and drizzles more across his fingers, and then over Mingyu’s entrance, too. The glistening liquid drips from the tip of the bottle and Mingyu, shy or surprised by the coolness of the lube, exhales sharply, the muscles of his hole fluttering as some of the lube seeps into him. Wonwoo chases the trail of wetness sliding down his perineum and thighs, smoothing it and spreading across his skin and his entrance with his fingertips.

They both like it wet, but admittedly, Wonwoo’s the one who’s always liked seeing Mingyu like this, dripping and messy and slick with his own precome. He’s never been able to _touch_ Mingyu like this properly, not with his arm still healing and the other fully functioning but otherwise incapable of acting on his desire. He’s always had to watch as Mingyu touched himself, and fingered himself, smearing lube across his thighs and over his cock, his fingers glistening wet with his own precome. 

He’s waited so long for this, trapped behind the gilded bars of a purgatory trapped at the middle point between heaven and hell. 

It’s Wonwoo’s turn. It’s _his turn_ , at last, to make Mingyu feel everything he’s been feeling for the past weeks and months; it’s his turn to push Mingyu to the edge of pleasure and keep him there, desperate and hungry, strangled by the urge to beg and cry out ecstasy. 

“Such a messy boy,” Wonwoo tuts, palming at Mingyu’s cock and trailing his hand down across his opening, letting the tip of his finger tease at his entrance. He strokes at Mingyu’s perineum, using the precome streaking across his palm and fingers to coat it with slickness before moving back to trace around his hole. Mingyu’s so sensitive, the barest brush of his fingertip has him trembling and making soft, weak, muffled sounds of pleasure.

“W-Wonwoo.” Mingyu whimpers, upper torso twisting in the sheets, because he knows (without Wonwoo even having to say it; he’s a _good boy_ after all) that he’s not allowed to move his hips. 

“You want another finger, baby?” 

Mingyu’s eyes go big and round, and he nods hastily, a muscle in his cock twitching.

“P- _please_.”

Wonwoo presses back inside him with two fingers, stroking against his walls and curling towards Mingyu’s abdomen. Mingyu’s thigh jumps as he makes a broken little noise, and Wonwoo shushes him softly, rubbing at the arch of his hipbone with his thumb. He slides his fingers out, thumb brushing against Mingyu’s perineum, and then thrusts them back inside. It’s so much smoother with lube and Mingyu’s own natural precome slicking the way, that Wonwoo finds his prostate in moments. On one of his thrusts, the slightest press of his fingertips against a certain spot inside Mingyu makes his back arch and his thighs shake as he cries out, high and sharp. 

“You’re doing so well, baby.” Wonwoo says, brushing harder against the spot. “Taking my fingers so well.”

Mingyu moans, head falling back against the bed and his chin tipped towards the ceiling. His hands come up to press over his eyes, obscuring his expression so that Wonwoo can’t see him. Wonwoo takes one of his wrists and pulls it away gently, twisting his fingers as he fucks them back inside him so he catches the exact moment when Mingyu’s lashes tremble and flutter, when his throat locks tight with pleasure and the breath catches on his lips.

Wonwoo can feel Mingyu tightening around him as he fucks his fingers in and out of Mingyu, gripping onto his fingers each time with a little more pressure, a little more urgency. The thought of Mingyu, heat and wetness and rippling muscle, around his cock instead of his fingers sends a wave of arousal through him so intense that he has to pause for a moment to catch his breath. Wonwoo nudges against his prostate again, and this time Mingyu grinds his hips down to meet him, tightening his hole around Wonwoo’s fingers as he thrusts against the sweet pressure.

Wonwoo draws his fingers slowly out of Mingyu and presses back in with three, the give of his entrance taking them deeper with less resistance from all the heat and lube and precome. Mingyu writhes and twists on the sheets above him, mouth open in a state of perpetual bliss, whimpering high in his throat every time Wonwoo grazes teasingly against his prostate.

Mingyu’s so pretty like this — more than pretty; Wonwoo wasn’t exaggerating when he likened him to art, he’s _breathtaking_ , mesmerising with each tiny movement he makes, each twitch and flutter of his lashes, his hair sweat-soaked and strewn across his forehead, the slick gleam of sweat across his pecs and abs, the precome dripping steadily from the tip of his pretty cock down to his rim and the edges of Wonwoo’s fingers. A rush of affection, stronger and more immediate than arousal, surges through him. Mingyu’s so _good_ for him, he’s so patient, and obedient, and understanding. Wonwoo could ask anything of him, he knows, and Mingyu would do it unquestioningly.

Wonwoo curls his fingers, changing his angle as he plunges his fingers deeper into Mingyu.

Mingyu lets out a staggered cry, back arching desperately. “Wonwoo,” he gasps, fingers scrambling to tug at Wonwoo’s wrist, curling tight around it with a white knuckled grip. “I’ll come. _I’ll come_ , please —” 

Wonwoo lets the pressure seep away, softening his strokes and pulling out to circle his fingertips around Mingyu’s rim as Mingyu bites back a moan, shoving his wrist against his mouth as if it’ll help hold back the urge to come.

“You’re not allowed to come.”

Wonwoo brushes his thumb against Mingyu’s perineum, through the wetness that’s gathered there from Mingyu’s dripping cock and the excessive amounts of lube he’s used.

“You want to be a good boy, don’t you?”

“I — I can’t, Wonwoo — _hyung, please_ ,” Mingyu stutters, his thighs tightening around Wonwoo as he twists his hips in an attempt to get away. But his muscles are fluttering and squeezing around Wonwoo, like he can’t get enough, like he can’t _help himself_. “I wanna be good, hyung. I wanna be good but I’m gonna — I’ll come. I’ll —”

Wonwoo leans down and captures his lips in a kiss, mid-gasp, thrusting his tongue into Mingyu’s mouth like he’s been fucking him with his fingers, harsh and fast, a relentlessness to the way he leaves Mingyu with no way to catch his breath or steady his pulse or do anything but think about Wonwoo and his mouth, the way he’s thrusting his fingers into his hole and brushing against his prostate.

He breaks the kiss with Mingyu reduced to a flushed breathless mess beneath him, and bites at the alluring swell of Mingyu’s bottom lip for good measure before drawing back and sliding his fingers out of Mingyu.

Mingyu hasn’t come yet but he looks like he might at any second, a pretty flush settling high on his cheeks, tingeing his skin like sunset.

He’s been so good, Wonwoo’s so, _so_ proud of him.

Forget about _Mingyu_ , he’s not going to last either. A single look from Mingyu, all hunger and desperation to please, to pleasure, at the right moment might just send him over the edge. He uncaps the lube and coats himself in it before turning his attention back to Mingyu. 

With one hand stroking softly at Mingyu’s thigh, he shifts closer into the space between his legs. His gaze lifts and Mingyu’s staring at him, half-lidded and halfway wrecked but there’s so much _emotion_ bleeding through his expression Wonwoo forgets momentarily how to breathe. There’s desire and arousal and the steadily burning heat of hunger left to simmer for days, weeks, months, but threaded through that, like a sky shot through with gold at dusk, is _love_. Love in all its permutations: affection, adoration, devotion, trust. 

He’s so _beautiful_. Wonwoo loves him so much. He takes Mingyu’s jaw into his hand and tips their foreheads together, breathing him in and feeling his body fill with an all-consuming warmth. 

“I love you.” Wonwoo says, low and soft into the dark between them. 

Mingyu makes a quiet, almost wounded noise, tilting his face a little more so he can brush his lips across Wonwoo’s in an achingly tender kiss. 

“I love you, too — _so much_ ,” Mingyu breathes, eyes wide and earnest as he tips his forehead against Wonwoo’s. “But if you don’t put your dick inside me right now I’m going to jerk myself off while you watch.”

Wonwoo lets out a chuckle, releasing Mingyu and pulling away so he can anchor his hand on Mingyu’s hip. Mingyu’s breath hitches sharply as the tip of his dick brushes against his rim and Wonwoo can see his fingers curling and uncurling in the sheets from his peripheral vision. Wonwoo keeps his gaze fixed on Mingyu, drinking in the sight of him like he’s trying to commit every detail, every flicker of movement to memory. He watches as he pushes into Mingyu, watches as his face freezes in time like a negative from one of his film cameras, the exact moment of anticipation melting into bliss burning into the surface his eyes like he’s staring into the sun.

A ragged moan tears from Mingyu’s lips, tapering off into a trembling, desperate whimper. And Wonwoo — Wonwoo can’t even think to breathe, or to moan, the only thing consuming his mind is the sensation of being swallowed by wet heat and tightness so sharp and balanced on the tight-wire between pain and pleasure it’s dizzying. And the deeper he pushes into Mingyu, the slide made slick and effortless by how worked over Mingyu’s hole is already, the intensity of the heat and pleasure builds and swells, threatening to spill over and out of Wonwoo before he’s even had time to process it.

Mingyu’s keening, his hands scrabbling to clutch at Wonwoo, and everything inside him tightens all of a sudden without warning. The pressure comes so fast and constricting Wonwoo loses his breath, his concentration spiralling out.

“Wonwoo, _Wonwoo_ , _fuck_ , I — ” Mingyu chokes out, strangled and wrecked, his eyes wide and blown from being so overwhelmed.

“Hey, _hey_ ,” Wonwoo says, shushing him gently, reaching out to cup his cheek. “Look at me.”

Mingyu does as he asks, eyes shiny and gleaming with a film of tears. Wonwoo thumbs at his jaw, a cascade of fondness breaking up the single-minded desire with the sweetness of a breeze on a sweltering day. His brows are scrunched from being pushed to the edge repeatedly by Wonwoo’s ministrations and kept there with no reprieve, the muscles in his throat taut like every sound tearing out of his mouth is a kind of sacrilege.

“I want to make you feel so good,” Wonwoo breathes. ”I want to fill you up and fuck you and make you feel _so good_ that the only thing you can remember is the feeling of me inside you and not the weeks and weeks we’ve spent waiting for this.”

It sparks a shudder from Mingyu, the flutter of a dragonfly wing skimming the undisturbed surface of a lake and setting off an interminable ripple. His lips part, pink and bruised, and Wonwoo traces the tip of his finger across the seam of them just to see what Mingyu will do. Mingyu, as he’d guessed as much, opens his mouth, tongue flicking out to lick at Wonwoo’s fingertip. He curls his lips around it, sucking on it softly and taking it deeper into his mouth.

“I want to make you feel good, baby,” Wonwoo says, slipping two fingers into Mingyu’s mouth now and feeling him suckle around them, getting them wet and slick he’s so eager to have them between his lips. “— But only if you’re ready for it.”

Mingyu grunts, letting Wonwoo’s fingers slide from his mouth as he lifts his chin stubbornly. “I’m ready, _I swear_ , I was just — ” He cuts himself short, brow knitting as he struggles for words.

Wonwoo brushes his fingers across Mingyu’s lips, shiny with his saliva, and caresses his cheek, silencing him.

“Okay.” He murmurs. “As long as you’re sure.”

“ _I’m sure._ ” Mingyu gasps. “Please, _please_ , Wonwoo — _fuck me_ , fuck me, I wanna feel you inside me, filling me up, _please_ —” 

Wonwoo wraps a hand around the base of his cock, steadying himself as he returns to pushing inside of Mingyu. He sinks inch by inch, stretching Mingyu open as he dissolves into a string of moans and half-choked cries of _please_ and _fuck_ and _Wonwoo_. He’s barely breathing with the heat and pressure of Mingyu surrounding him, his whole body feels like kindling, like one wayward spark might trigger wildfire. The sound he makes when he’s all the way inside of Mingyu is something he’s never heard come from his own lips before.

He stills, his muscles almost quivering with the effort to keep still so Mingyu can adjust to the feeling of him, the fullness stretching him wide around Wonwoo’s dick. For a moment, all Mingyu does is breathe, his chest falling and rising with unsteady pants of air, and Wonwoo can feel him physically trying to relax, clenching and then loosening himself around Wonwoo. He knows that Mingyu has toys, knows how much Mingyu likes having something in his ass even if it’s just a vibrator or a silicon replica of the real thing. The thought sends a purr of satisfaction through him, a base, possessive instinct coiling inside him, to know that it’s because it’s _him_ , his cock, his effect on Mingyu, that’s overwhelming him like this.

“Wonwoo,” Mingyu urges, disrupting Wonwoo’s efforts to think about not coming before he’s even gotten to fuck Mingyu. “ _Move_.”

He doesn’t need to be begged twice. Wonwoo lifts his hips, pulling out of Mingyu, the drag of his cock through Mingyu’s walls as he slides slowly out of him is so good, _so perfect_ , he wonders how he ever survived two months and then some without it. He curls his hand around Mingyu’s thigh as he pushes back in, the give of Mingyu’s hole as he eases in tearing a groan out of him, low and crushed, laid bare by the feeling of Mingyu crying out and tightening around him as he bottoms out.

Wonwoo caresses the skin of Mingyu’s thigh softly, massaging at the curve of his hipbone and then travelling higher to graze his fingertips across his stomach, along his abs. He wants to take Mingyu apart, wants to _ruin_ him and leave him and wrecked, yes, but he also wants him to feel loved and adored and taken care of, wants him to know that Wonwoo’s never loved anyone like this, never _wanted_ anyone like this before. He brushes at one of Mingyu’s nipples with his finger and Mingyu makes a light choking sound, back arching slightly in response to the stimulation. Mingyu’s always been hyper-sensitive here. It’s one of his weaknesses. He loves having his nipples played with, loves the feeling of having Wonwoo’s hands or mouth on him. 

When he’s at his most sensitive after hours of Wonwoo doing nothing but kissing and sucking at his skin, his throat, littering bites across his thighs and chest, he can come just from Wonwoo toying with his nipples. 

The gentlest of his touches has Mingyu whining and mewling, stuttering nonsense as he keeps him distracted, sinking deeply inside of him. He times his next thrust, sinking balls deep as he closes his lips around one of Mingyu’s nipples, curling the flat of his tongue around it. Mingyu bucks, his muscles spasming around Wonwoo as he lets out a noise that sounds like he’s dying. Wonwoo drags the flat of his tongue across the tip of his nipple, right where the sensitive nerve endings are, grazing his teeth across his skin, and Mingyu rakes his hands up Wonwoo’s back, blunt fingernails digging into his spine. 

Wonwoo pulls back until he’s all the way out of Mingyu, leaving his hole fluttering and clenching around empty air, the slickness of the lube and his own precome dripping down his cock glistens wetly around the sides of his rim. And then he bites down at the same moment he plunges his cock back into Mingyu, and Mingyu makes a staggered gasping sound like he’s forgotten how to breathe. Mingyu’s cock bounces between them, slapping against the ridges of his abs and Wonwoo’s stomach from the force of his thrusts, red and dripping a steady stream of precome. With a sweet, soft moan on his lips, Mingyu winds his fingers into Wonwoo’s hairs, his curls now sweat-slick and matted from all the exertion and body heat, and pulls so hard Wonwoo thinks he might tear his hair out.

“You’re doing _so well_ , Baby.” Wonwoo breathes as he angles his hips, thrusting into a spot in Mingyu that made him whimper and twist his hips a heartbeat ago. He pulls back out, the drag of Mingyu’s walls around his cock so hot and wet around him as he slides out of him that he bites his lip so hard he swears he can taste the metallic bite of blood on his tongue.

“You’re so good for me. Such a good boy.”

Mingyu’s grip tightens on him, the hand in his hair toying with his curls, carding his fingers through Wonwoo’s hair aimlessly, curling suddenly in a fist as Wonwoo thrusts back inside of him. 

“ _Hyung._ ” It’s the most coherent thing Mingyu’s said in minutes. And an honorific of all things. 

The thing is, Mingyu’s a brat when it comes to formalities. He’d slipped into banmal within a week of meeting Wonwoo and Wonwoo had taken it at face value as Mingyu being _Mingyu_ , harmless and overtly friendly. Despite their three year age difference, Mingyu slips in and out of it with the nonchalance of a same-age friend. He only uses _hyung_ these days when he wants something.

Mingyu’s gazing at him, mouth slightly parted, his lashes wet and his face flushed, wrecked yet pretty as a doll even with his hair strewn across the pillows and slick with sweat; it’s _maddening_ how beautiful he looks. It’s the look in his eyes, though, the expression of pure, unfiltered _love_ there that steals Wonwoo’s breath. It’s love agape: unconditional, selfless, endless. 

Wonwoo’s hips stutter in their rhythm, his heart shudders like an echo of the movement, and he feels his whole body pull towards him, Mingyu’s gravity drawing him into his orbit, his heat and warmth and _love_ eclipsing him. Mingyu lifts his hands to stroke his fingertips across Wonwoo’s cheeks, not quite cupping his jaw, but close enough that he can feel the heat pulsing through Mingyu’s skin.

“You’re so beautiful, hyung. Everything about you.” Mingyu whispers, dazed like he’s moving through the shade of a dream, half-awake. His eyes shutter delicately as he inhales, his lips slick and a soft, bruised pink from the imprint of Wonwoo’s lips and teeth.

 _I should be saying that to_ you. 

“You make me feel so good.”

A shimmer darts across the surface of Mingyu’s eyes, a falling star blazing across the night sky, its tail chasing behind it lit up like a firework. Wonwoo swears he could map the entire universe in his eyes if he had the time.

“Not just — not just right now. Always. You make me feel — like all the things I do matter. Like _I_ matter.”

Mingyu brushes his thumb across Wonwoo’s mouth, the pad of his thumb lingering at Wonwoo’s bottom lip.

“You see me _._ ”

Wonwoo feels himself come apart, slowly at first and then all at once, like waves breaking against the rocks and dissipating into sea spray and a thousand tiny specks of salt and seawater. He feels himself come apart, in Mingyu’s hands, his bones and skin turning weightless, tearing itself free from the anchor of gravity. 

There’s nothing he can think to say for a moment — his mind and body, for once, in perfect equilibrium on this.

 _It defies words how much I love you_ , Wonwoo thinks.

Wonwoo bends his head and kisses the tips of Mingyu’s fingers still hovering in front of his face. He kisses the center of his palm, where the warmth radiates from. It’s gentle, and reverent, and all this time they’ve been waiting for this moment, the anticipation so intense and consuming it’s all Wonwoo’s been able to think about, he’d almost forgotten how much he’d die just to hold Mingyu’s hand in the beginning. 

“Meeting you was one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” Wonwoo says, slipping his fingers in between the spaces of Mingyu’s.

Mingyu breaks out into a smile, one that cuts through the tears gleaming in his eyes like sunrise on the horizon of the ocean. He curls his hand tightly around Wonwoo’s. He feels Mingyu shifting his hips, lifting them higher so he can feel Wonwoo press deeper inside of him. Wonwoo’s breath catches in his throat at the sensation of Mingyu’s muscles tightening around him. 

“Please, hyung,” he says softly. “Make me feel good.” 

Wonwoo squeezes Mingyu’s hand before letting go. He slides out of Mingyu until he’s all the way outside only to snap his hips forward without warning, slamming into Mingyu so fast and so hard that it makes him cry out, his back arching from the bed like he’s been winded. 

There’s no more talking after that. Wonwoo sets a hard, fast rhythm, pounding into Mingyu, the filthy, wet slapping of their skin the only sound apart from the litany of cries and moans coming from Mingyu’s lips. It’s electrifying, watching Mingyu come apart as he fucks into him, the wet, slick sound of his hips pounding into Mingyu downright obscene but nothing in comparison to the noises Mingyu’s making. Wonwoo presses against Mingyu’s thighs, lifting them higher before he slams his cock so deep into Mingyu it makes them both moan. He pushes the backs of Mingyu’s thighs, folding him into himself as he pumps in and out of him. 

At this new angle, Wonwoo finds his prostrate without even having to try. Mingyu doesn’t quite _scream_ , but the noise he makes is something Wonwoo’s yet to make him cry out in bed. Wonwoo grinds his hips down and Mingyu sobs, scrabbling at the sheets, at Wonwoo, at anything he can get his hands on.

Mingyu’s so sensitive in bed, it’s a consummate pleasure to see him unravel beneath Wonwoo. Whether he’s playing with his hole and teasing him with his fingers or toys, or sucking his cock and making him tremble and whimper as he drips messily all over Wonwoo’s chin and hands, Mingyu’s so unconsciously performative about his reactions. He’s so _responsive_. There’s something musical to the sounds he makes; it’s not even to put on a show, because Wonwoo knows how much deadlier Mingyu can be when he’s _trying_ , but it’s his open-heartedness and the way he wears his feelings on his sleeve that seems to multiply tenfold in bed. 

It’s gratifying, to know Mingyu trusts him like this. Trusts him to see him at his most vulnerable and bare. 

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo says. “Touch yourself, baby.”

Mingyu blinks, eyelashes fluttering like he’s struggling to focus on Wonwoo’s voice and the feeling of him brushing against his sensitive prostrate. 

“W — what?” 

“Touch yourself.” Wonwoo repeats. “You’ve been so good for me. I want you to see you come.”

Mingyu lifts his hand and Wonwoo takes his wrist gently, his fingers pressed over Mingyu’s as he wraps them around Mingyu’s cock.

It’s a testament to how gone Mingyu is, but also how eager he is to please, to do whatever Wonwoo wants at his command, that he hasn’t tried to touch himself before Wonwoo brought it up. He’s so _good_. Wonwoo’s going to make him feel so good. Mingyu tilts his head back into the pillows and stares at Wonwoo, his mouth a little slack, as Wonwoo curls their fingers around the base of him.

“You’ve been so good for me, sweetheart.” Wonwoo says, starting to stroking their hands up and down Mingyu’s cock, coating them in the precome leaking from his tip. He’s so _wet_ and messy it’s been dripping down to the crease of his thigh, mingling with the lube smeared around his whole and the place where Wonwoo is pressed inside of him.

“I’m gonna — _Wonwoo_ , I’m gonna come,” Mingyu gasps, voice strangled as Wonwoo pumps their fingers up and down the length of him.

Wonwoo pulls out of Mingyu and thrusts back in, slower but he doesn’t stop until he’s seated inside of Mingyu balls deep. He brushes against Mingyu’s prostate on the way out and Mingyu squirms, moaning helplessly. His cock twitches in their grips and Mingyu bites at his lip hard enough to bruise as Wonwoo fucks back into him, aiming directly for his prostate.

“Then come, baby.” Wonwoo says, fisting their hands around Mingyu’s cock and stroking in time with his thrusts.   

The words unlock something in Mingyu, his eyes going wide as he arches, his hand pumping at his cock as Wonwoo fucks him, the pace of his hips relentless, unremitting, as he pounds into Mingyu, angling into his prostate on alternating thrusts, grazing against the spot inside of Mingyu that’ll light his body up and tear apart the last shreds of control holding him together. 

“You’re doing so well, baby. You’ve been so good for me.” He snaps his hips, fucking into Mingyu, letting his sounds guide his cock home, rubbing against his prostate until Mingyu’s thighs shake. 

“ _Wonwoo,_ ” Mingyu sobs. “Feels — feels so good. _Fuck_. Wonwoo — ”

“That’s it, baby, just like that, sweetheart.” Wonwoo brushes his thumb across Mingyu’s soaking wet slit, smearing the slick across the tips of his fingers and then lifting his hand to press it to his lips.

Mingyu’s mouth falls open immediately, sweet and obedient and ready to do anything for Wonwoo. He lets Wonwoo slip his fingertips into his mouth, lets him press his own precome in between his lips and against his tongue with a moan. His muscles flutter and tighten around Wonwoo’s cock as he presses his hips up to meet his thrusts, and it’s so filthy, so _obscene_ to watch Mingyu lick his own precome from Wonwoo’s hand, he almost comes from the sight of Mingyu sucking at his fingers. 

“You’re such a mess,” Wonwoo murmurs, awe tingeing his voice. 

He strokes at Mingyu’s thighs, soaking in the satisfaction of watching them jump and twitch as Mingyu squirms. 

“Wonwoo. _Please_. H-harder. Wanna — _ah_ , I wanna come.” 

Wonwoo grips Mingyu’s hips and snaps his hips forwards, burying his cock inside of him. He fucks in and out of Mingyu’s hole, driving his cock deeper and deeper into Mingyu as he pumps his cock with both their hands wrapped tight around him. Mingyu’s breath is coming sharper and faster, in pants and gasps and choked-off moans. Wonwoo twists his hips as he sinks his cock inside of Mingyu, pressing hard against his prostate as he fists at his cock and Mingyu’s voice tapers off into nothing, a silence shattering through him, his mouth open in the shape of a sob or scream. 

Mingyu comes, thick, white ropes of come spilling from his cock and across his stomach. Wonwoo fucks him through it, through the excruciating pressure of Mingyu’s hole tightening desperately around his cock, his muscles clenching around him.

He’s close, he can taste it, feel it in his skin like sparks catching, kerosene threatening to spill into wildfire. He pounds into Mingyu, driven by mindless pleasure and the want pulsing in him like a second heartbeat, plunging in and out of Mingyu, chasing the heat and tightness spiralling out of Mingyu, around him, consuming him and setting him alight. Mingyu presses his hand to Wonwoo’s chest, stroking at his collarbone and the beginnings of a hickey beneath the edge of it, and seals his lips over the same spot. It’s this, the feeling of Mingyu’s teeth in his skin, compounded with the tightness of Mingyu clenching around him, that sends him over the edge. 

The euphoria hits and surges, burning all the way through everything else inside him and leaving him gasping for air as he comes inside of Mingyu, spilling deep inside of him.

He can feel Mingyu clenching and unclenching, adjusting to the sensation of Wonwoo’s come inside him and leaking out around his cock to drip from his rim. For a moment that seems to last either a heartbeat or an eternity — as if time itself has been strung out beside him — all he does is breathe: _in_ , the pleasure searing so hard at every nerve ending inside of him he feels boneless, liquid; _out_ , his cock still buried in Mingyu, wrapped up in the soft heat of his body, the only thing keeping him tied to tangible reality.

Mingyu’s touch draws him slowly back together, the gentle flutter of his fingers in his hair, sifting through the curls at his ears. Wonwoo exhales, his heartbeat steadying as he focuses on the feeling of Mingyu’s hands in his hair, playing with the soft strands curling at his neck and stroking across his jawline. 

“That was — ” Wonwoo’s voice trails off, at a loss for words let alone breath.

 _Amazing, incredible fucking mind-blowing_ —

“Yeah,” Mingyu agrees.

Wonwoo has a feeling he’s thinking the exact same thing.

He shifts so he can pull out of Mingyu, gently, and Mingyu whimpers at the feeling of being empty after so long. His come leaks from his hole, dripping down his perineum and to the crease of his thigh. Wonwoo bites his lip, stroking his finger against the streak of come and tracing its path back to Mingyu’s hole. Mingyu whines softly under his breath, hole twitching from oversensitivity and how thoroughly _wrecked_ Wonwoo’s left him.

He reaches for Wonwoo, and nothing more needs to be said. Wonwoo lets himself be enveloped in Mingyu’s arms, pressing his lips to Mingyu’s and kissing him, pouring every last inch of himself into the kiss, the exhaustion still lingering in his bones be damned. The kiss doesn’t deepen beyond the light brush of their tongues, Mingyu letting Wonwoo lick the taste of him from his mouth, his hands curling tenderly in his hair, but it sends a thrill through him when he feels Mingyu smile into the kiss.

Wonwoo’s about to pull away anyway so he can begin cleaning them up when they’re interrupted by a low, gurgling sound comingn from the general vicinity of Mingyu’s stomach.

How Mingyu still has the energy to go red, he doesn’t know, but there’s a high blush tingeing his cheeks and creeping down his chest, tinting his golden skin a dusty rose.

Wonwoo arches a bluntly amused brow at him. “ _Hungry_ , baby?”

Mingyu flushes darker as he swats at Wonwoo’s arm. “Shut up.”

“All of that and you still have the energy to be _hungry_.” Wonwoo teases. “You never cease to amaze, Kim Mingyu.”

“We didn’t have _dinner_!” Mingyu splutters, features twisting indignantly. “And I was so nervous about tonight that I only ate half of my lunch. Technically, this is _your_ fault.”

Wonwoo lets out a laugh, taking Mingyu’s face into his hands against his protests and half-hearted attempts to shove him away. He kisses him sweetly, letting it linger, kissing at Mingyu’s bottom lip and then rising to kiss his nose and finally his forehead.

“I’m hungry, too, actually. I’ll make dinner.” 

“Oh?” Mingyu down at him innocently. “Can’t wait to eat overcooked rice and poorly seasoned meat.”

Wonwoo’s jaw drops. “Take that _back_. And to think, I just gave you the best damn sex of your life. I can’t believe you’d say that to me.”

Mingyu shrugs, a devilish little smile curving at his lips. The power he’s given this little shit over him, he  _swears_. 

“Just being honest, hyung. We both know you’d prefer if I cooked.”

“Perhaps. If you can  _stand_.” Wonwoo smirks.

Mingyu scoffs, but doesn’t fight it. He flops back onto the bed, kicking his legs out, careless of the fact that he’s leaking come and lube all over their sheets. 

Fuck it, they’re going to have change the whole bed anyway. Wonwoo sprawls bonelessly on the bed beside him.

“Give me a moment to regain feeling in my lower half and then I’ll make ramyeon,” Mingyu says. 

“Okay, baby.” Wonwoo answers sweetly. “Take your time.”

“Is that going to be a _thing_ now?” 

“What?”

“You know what.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sweetheart.” 

Mingyu groans, turning so he can shove his face into his pillow. Wonwoo can see the blush creeping down his neck. 

“I thought you liked it when I call you pet names.” 

“I do,” Mingyu says, lips forming a pout as he rolls back to face Wonwoo. “But you do it _all_ the time now. And it’s — I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when you — ”

He cuts himself off abruptly, burying his face in his hands this time. He’s so _cute_ , Wonwoo thinks his heart might burst. And how embarrassing that would be, going into cardiac arrest right here on their bed, just moments after they had sex. 

Wonwoo wraps his hand around Mingyu’s wrist, tugging his hand gently away from his face so he can look Mingyu in the eye.

“I love you. _So much._ ” 

Mingyu makes a soft, strangled noise in the back of his throat, his shoulders rising as he curls in on himself. 

“I love you, too.”

Wonwoo kisses his forehead again. Because Mingyu is his _baby_ and his darling and it makes Mingyu happy when he hears it.

They drag themselves out of bed after ten more minutes of kissing and soft, lingering touches and make ramyeon. Mingyu even lets them eat in bed after determining the sheets to be too filthy to be salvaged anyway. At one point Wonwoo attempts to feed Mingyu and Mingyu, embarrassed, chokes halfway on his mouthful of noodles because he hears Wonwoo mutter “ _cute_ ” under his breath. This sets off a chain of events in which: Wonwoo slapping his back urgently causes Mingyu to accidentally swipe his arm across the bed, which in turn causes his bowl of ramyeon to spill onto the bed.

It’s funny how things come full circle, because after all, it was Mingyu’s big heart and clumsy, chaotic propensity for disaster that brought them together.

Later, after bursting out into exhausted laughter and surrender, with the bed stripped clean and replaced with clean sheets, they fall asleep: Wonwoo curled around Mingyu, and their fingers intertwined over Mingyu’s chest, pressed over the soft beat of his heart.

 

 

\-----

 

 

Wonwoo wouldn’t say that he’s desensitised now, per se, to Mingyu in various states of undress. But the sight of his bare chest doesn’t send him into heart palpitations and shortness of breath anymore the way it used to. It’s still distracting, and agonising, but it’s a different kind of torment now that Wonwoo can reach for him, tug him in by the waist, run his fingers through his hair and kiss him, slow and purposeful.

It’s his favourite kind of kiss.

Catching Mingyu off-guard, sometimes even mid-ramble when he’s forgotten how the long-winded story even started. Just because he can. Because he lives for the breathless split second before Mingyu’s senses catch on and he kisses back, melting like sugar into liquid heat, soft and warm beneath Wonwoo’s hands. 

Wonwoo loves all of their kisses in different ways, in different moments. Midnight kisses that taste like starlight and tiny, daring bursts of heat when they’re walking home from a date, lingering in the shadows in between the streetlights to hold hands. Sunset kisses when Mingyu comes home from work still smelling of wood smoke and cinders, eyes dark and heady with adrenaline as he presses Wonwoo to the nearest surface (usually the couch, occasionally the door) and spends an evening taking him apart, lighting him up from inside like his veins are pure filament and kindling, his palms and his lips searing like fire. 

His secret favourite will always be morning kisses, just as the sun is awakening over the horizon, when Mingyu thinks he’s still too lost in sleep to remember.

Mingyu wakes with the dawn and Wonwoo’s a light sleeper and the act of untangling himself from Wonwoo always wakes him, too. It used to be like winter cold slipping in between the covers and stealing quietly in with the dark to sink into his bones. And then one morning Wonwoo rolled over and wrapped his arms around Mingyu, nuzzling into his neck and breathing in his smell.  

 _“Kiss me good morning.”_ He’d said, voice thick and low and husky with his head still half wrapped in dreams. 

So Mingyu had turned over slowly, taken Wonwoo’s face into his hands and pressed their lips together, tongue brushing across Wonwoo’s to remind him of how they’d kept each other warm last night, how it felt when he was inside of him, their bodies entwined like a constellation. 

Now, Mingyu kisses him good morning every day before he leaves the bed and then Wonwoo goes back to sleep. 

Not to be outdone, Byeol will join in now and then, padding over to Wonwoo’s side of the bed to slobber a clumsy, wet kiss to his face. Out of love. Because he needs Wonwoo to know that he loves him as much as Mingyu does.

 

 

 

\-----

 

 

Every other day, Mingyu takes Byeol with him on his morning runs. Theoretically, this is an activity Wonwoo actively approves of and even encourages. It keeps Byeol from trying to drag him out of bed before noon on the weekends, Wonwoo gets to sleep in for a couple more hours and Mingyu and Byeol get to do their mutual favourite thing in the world which is hang out at the park together. A win-win scenario all-around.

Except that sometimes, Wonwoo doesn’t want to wake up to an empty bed on a Sunday morning. Sometimes he just wants to wake up with the love of his life and his warm, muscular chest beneath him or wrapped around him as they sleep in together and have slow, lazy morning sex.

He’s tried convincing Mingyu to stay in bed before but every time he tries to muster up the beginnings of his seduction plot, Mingyu waves him off and insists on starting the day early because there’s too much to do. 

It’s tragic, frankly.

Here he is, perfectly willing and ready — just not very tempting or sexually appealing first thing in the morning when his hair is a mess and there’s sleep crusted in the corners of his eyes.

Wonwoo decides on a Saturday night that, for once, he’s going to surprise Mingyu. Because if Mingyu won’t stay in bed long enough to have spontaneous (but slow and laidback, with minimal effort) morning sex then Wonwoo will simply have to bring it to him.

It, being _him_ , of course. With a picnic blanket and champagne and an assortment of sandwiches, fruit slices and chocolate-dipped strawberries that Wonwoo will feed him. Because that’s the kind of sickeningly romantic and clichéd extravagance that Mingyu likes and will inevitably want to one up him for. Hopefully by spending the rest of the afternoon in bed. 

Wonwoo has the Romantic Couples Deluxe Forever Love Picnic Set delivered after Mingyu has already left with Byeol on his run. It’d been so humiliating a blow to his pride the physical evidence irrevocably marked on his internet browser history he’d resorted to using an alias. So the complementary card that comes with it reads “To Younghee. With Love, From Chulsoo” inside of a big red love heart surrounded by roses and a wreath of smaller hearts. He packs it with a blanket into the car and drives to Mingyu and Byeol’s favourite park which is a ten minute walk from their apartment.

He parks and gets out of the park, the hamper surreptitiously hidden behind him (as much as he can manage what with it being hamper-size and enormous) as he goes to find Mingyu and Byeol. 

What he finds, instead of Mingyu running and playing with Byeol, is the top of Mingyu’s head peeking out of the top of a small crowd of middle-aged women. They’re all dressed for exercise in gym pants and sneakers but as far as Wonwoo can tell the only muscles they’re exercising are their _mouths_. Mingyu must say something because laughter erupts from the circle of women, thrilled like Mingyu’s just made the funniest joke they’ve ever heard. 

Mingyu _is_ funny. Wonwoo knows that. In general, though, he’s kind of cheesy and ridiculous and has recently caught Wonwoo’s habit of making terrible dad jokes. Wonwoo frowns, torn between storming over there and greeting his tall, beautiful _boyfriend_ loudly and publicly, and not wanting to cause a fuss in a park that Mingyu and Byeol love and come to every week. 

And Wonwoo gets it. He understands. Mingyu’s tall and charming and devastatingly attractive, there’s no one on this planet who _wouldn’t_ fall all over themselves to spend a few minutes basking in his presence and soaking in the warmth of his smile. But these women don’t know Mingyu like he does. They don’t know that he’s unfailingly polite and well-mannered and he’d indulge them even if he hated every single minute of it because that’s how kind and sweet and generous he is. He probably doesn’t have the heart to walk away even though they could’ve been hounding him all afternoon for all Wonwoo knows. Mingyu’s too _nice_ and too stupidly handsome for his own good.

In the end, it’s Byeol that spots him first. He barks happily upon catching sight of Wonwoo, tugging himself free from Mingyu’s distracted grip and charging across the grass towards Wonwoo.

Wonwoo sets the hamper down gingerly on the ground and lets Byeol jump up into arms, wriggling around in satisfaction at finally having _someone’s_ full and undivided attention on him.

“Hyung?” Mingyu looks perplexed, if delighted, to see him. “What are you doing here?”

One of the women glances at him curiously before turning immediately to whisper none too subtly to the lady beside her.

“Just thought I’d drop by and see what you and Byeol were up to.” Wonwoo scratches at Byeol’s head.

“Mingyu, darling, who’s this?” The woman standing closest to Mingyu asks, designer sunglasses perched on her nose at just the right angle that she can stare down it at Wonwoo.

 _Darling?_ Wonwoo bites down on the urge to roll his eyes. (That’s _his_ pet endearment.)

Mingyu’s grin goes muted, straining into a polite smile. “This is. Uh. My —”

Friend, Wonwoo knows he’s about to say. _He’s my friend._ And more than the wayward frustration (okay, _fuck_ , fine, call it what it is: jealousy) churning in his gut at the sight of Mingyu surrounded by these women who don’t know he isn’t single, more than the uncomfortable feeling of this woman touching Mingyu’s arm as if she’s remotely young and unmarried enough to be flirting with a man half her age, it’s the thought of Mingyu having to lie and brush off what he is to him that makes Wonwoo feel like he’s swallowing crushed glass.

Wonwoo dips into a respectful bow, lower than necessary for strangers he has no connection to, and when he straightens back up there’s a flawless smile plastered to his face.

The kind of smile he saves for difficult eyewitnesses and associates of suspects who’ll inevitably cause trouble.  

“I’m Jeon Wonwoo, I’m his boyfriend.” Wonwoo glances over at Mingyu, eyes sparkling. “It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”

Mingyu bites on his lip, long canines sinking into his lip, and Wonwoo can tell he’s biting back laughter.

“These are some of the ladies I see at the park now and then when Byeol and I come for our morning run,” Mingyu explains, introducing each of them by name. To Wonwoo, their names go in one ear and out the other, but they don’t need to know that.

“Well,” Wonwoo says, petting at Byeol’s ears. “I’m sorry to interrupt but I’m going to have to steal Mingyu from you. _If that’s alright._ ”

Mingyu says his goodbyes, an obvious excitement to the air about him as he bows politely and waves at the women before hurriedly turning to join Wonwoo. He reaches over to pet at Byeol’s chin, stroking his fingers through Byeol’s fur as a diversion while he glances coyly up at Wonwoo through his lashes.

“What was _that_ about?” 

Wonwoo decides to feign ignorance, because having the truth dragged out of him like a bad tooth is _much_ more dignified than admitting he was jealous upfront.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“Really? So that whole “ _Excuse me, I’m his boyfriend_ ” thing was just for show?”

“I did _not_ say it like that.” 

“But you _were_ jealous.” Mingyu’s smiling now, pleased at his ability to draw this particular reaction out of Wonwoo. 

“Will it make you stop gloating if I say I was, just a little, and very irrationally?”

“Nope.” Mingyu replies, taking Byeol from Wonwoo’s arms. “I wanna enjoy this for a little longer, it was cute. I’ve never seen this side of you before.”

Byeol barks, possibly in agreement. Wonwoo will never know, but one thing’s for sure the tiny demon is _never_ going to be on his side.

“What’ve you got over there, by the way?” Mingyu tilts his head, nodding at the hamper still sitting on the ground. “ _Holy shit_ , is that a picnic basket?” 

Wonwoo exhales as he watches the remnants of his pride go down the drain. “It was supposed to be a surprise,” he mutters.

“Oh my god… _Hyung_ , that’s — ” Mingyu blinks like he’s still in the midst of processing the magnitude of Wonwoo’s gesture. “Wow. What brought this on? Did you break something? Do you need me to fix your computer again? I told you, you have to stop messing with the CPU, it’ll reset itself —” 

“Mingyu.” Wonwoo says, cutting Mingyu off abruptly mid-ramble. “I didn’t break anything, I’m not _you_.”

“Rude. But you have a point. Did you forget to do the laundry or something?”

Wonwoo sighs, a flicker of impatience darting across his face. “Is it so hard to believe I just wanted to do something nice and romantic for my _boyfriend_?”

“Just kidding, baby.” A smile curves at Mingyu’s lips as he reaches for Wonwoo’s hand and twines their fingers together. “It’s very sweet of you.”

“You bet your ass it is.” Wonwoo says, trying not to huff.

“Let’s go home.” Mingyu says, swinging their hands lightly between them. “We can have an indoor picnic. Outdoor ones are overrated.” 

“Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of a picnic?”

Mingyu places a huge palm on top of Byeol’s head, covering both of his ears as he lowers his voice to a tone only Wonwoo can hear. “Not if it means we can have sex on the picnic blanket afterwards.”

God, Wonwoo loves this man. So much. Has he mentioned how much he loves him?

Mingyu winks at him, which Wonwoo supposes is his way of congratulating himself for coming up with such a brilliant, ground-breaking idea.

“You’re sexy when you’re smart,” Wonwoo says, because Mingyu’s cute when he think he’s come up with an idea all by himself.

“I know.” Mingyu says, smug and gorgeous and glowing in the sunlight.

They walk to the car hand-in-hand and load everything, the picnic basket and Byeol, back into the car, and head home. 

And yes — for the record, they _do_ end up fucking on the picnic blanket.

 

 

\-----

 

 

Even though it feels like they’ve been through so much together — what with Wonwoo getting shot in the line of duty, and Mingyu finding him while doing _his_ job, and recovering, and not to mention the extensive amount of time they spent pining for each other and pretending like the feelings growing between them were strictly platonic — the first year of their relationship is still full of firsts.

Their first one hundred days. Their first trip together. Their first unofficial anniversary (the time they met in the café, before Mingyu accidentally punched him in the face in the clubs, and _definitely_ before Mingyu showed up in his apartment that one time wasted and stark naked).

The first time they celebrate Mingyu’s birthday together, Wonwoo takes him to one of the best restaurants in the city. He’d spent all of March worrying about what to get Mingyu and obsessing over the issue until Mingyu had started leaving carefully dropped hints for him. He’d bought Mingyu a white gold Cartier Love necklace encrusted with tiny diamonds and the date of their real anniversary engraved on the back, as well as a crimson lingerie set from a luxurious French boutique. Soojin had offered to help with suggestions, and Wonwoo, embarrassed but desperate, had reluctantly accepted.

Despite showering Mingyu in lavish, expensive gifts for his birthday, he’s made it very clear to Mingyu that for his _own_ birthday he neither wants nor expects this to be reciprocated. 

He’s not someone who indulges in luxury items the way Mingyu does, and he doesn’t care about the expense when it comes to gifts. As long as he gets to spend time with Mingyu and celebrate with their friends and loved ones, that’s all Wonwoo really cares about. He’d even made Mingyu promise that he wouldn’t, under any circumstances, spend over 150,000 won on his gift.

Mingyu had grudgingly accepted on the day, a few weeks ago when Wonwoo had first brought it up. But he’s been plotting something ever since, and for all of Wonwoo’s finely honed detective instincts and years of experience studying people with secrets to hide, he can’t seem to crack this case.

He’s aware that Mingyu has _something_ planned. But other than the obvious mystery surrounding his birthday present, Mingyu’s been acting completely normal.

It’s killing Wonwoo not knowing. Especially when Mingyu’s usually so transparent and easy to read.

(When he’d tried asking Jun at his birthday dinner if he knew what Mingyu was going to be giving him, Jun had simply scoffed and rolled his eyes.

“Let him have his surprise. You’ll find out in a couple hours anyway.” 

“But I need to _know_ , Jun. I’m his boyfriend. His would-be soulmate. It shouldn’t be this easy for him to hide something like this from me!”

“Now you’re just sounding crazy.” 

“Perhaps, but _god_ , he’s not even a good actor! He’s shit at it. I can’t believe he hasn’t cracked already.” 

“Maybe this is just that important to him.”

“Don’t you try to guilt-trip me about my own boyfriend.” 

“Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you convinced Yanan to ask me out on White Day.”

“Oh my god, you can’t _still_ be mad about this. I told you, I thought it would be _romantic_. And Minghao thought it was a good idea, too!”

“Minghao’s opinion is irrelevant, he’s equally at fault. The point is, thankfully we officially agreed to start seeing each other _after_ that. Now we have Valentine’s Day, White Day, _and_ our Throupleversary.”

“I’m worried, Jun, seriously. What if he breaks our promise and _actually_ goes all out? I don’t want him spending hundreds of thousands of won on me.”

“Nah. I know what he got you. It’s… let’s just say it’s something even money can’t buy.” 

“Well, fuck you, you can’t just say _that_ and _not_ tell me what it is.” 

“Can you hear that? That’s the sound of a tiny violin playing just for you, Wonwoo.”

“God. _Fine._ Guess I’ll just suffer then.”

“Yes, _you poor baby_ , with your big beautiful boyfriend going above and beyond to find you the perfect birthday present. There are people in warzones pitying your gay ass wishing they were you.”)

After they’ve said goodbye to their friends, Mingyu comes over to kiss him goodnight and tells him to head home first.

Naturally, this leads Wonwoo to the fear that the gift is too large and extravagant to give on the spot and is going to end up being rolled into the house on wheels or something equally ridiculous. 

Mingyu arrives at home twenty minutes after him, announcing his arrival with a rap of his knuckles on the door even though he has his own key.

“Hi,” he says, when the door opens, cheeks curving as his expression melts into a smile upon seeing Wonwoo. — That’s something Wonwoo will never get tired of, the soft, love-struck look Mingyu gets on his face when he sees Wonwoo. Wonwoo imagines he has the same thing going on whenever he looks at Mingyu and thinks Mingyu can’t see.

“Hey,” Wonwoo says, a smile curving on his lips, too.

Mingyu holds up a blindfold, one of their… _kinky_ ones from the box beneath their bed in a jet black silk. 

The possibility of Mingyu’s gift being something sexual had occurred to Wonwoo but he hadn’t considered it as a genuine prospect until now. He arches a brow at Mingyu.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Mingyu huffs. “It’s for your surprise.” 

Wonwoo turns and lets him tie the blindfold around his eyes and steer him back into the house. 

“Okay. Now stay there.”

“Can’t exactly go anywhere, can I?” 

Mingyu doesn’t answer but Wonwoo can hear his footsteps heading towards the door, there’s a muffled sound, like he’s mumbling under his breath, and then he’s coming back towards Wonwoo. 

Mingyu sucks in a breath and then lets it out slowly. “Alright. You can take your blindfold off.” 

It’s too fast for Mingyu to have changed into anything, or even taken anything _off_ ; there’s no way he managed to hide a sculpture or life size painting of Wonwoo in the hallway in the time he got here and put the blindfold on Wonwoo. He’s at a loss as to what Mingyu could have possibly gotten him that would’ve required so much enigma and secrecy and spectacle.

Wonwoo tugs the blindfold loose from his eyes, his breath in his throat and his heart tight in his chest. 

His present, _his surprise_ that Mingyu’s been hiding from him so well all these weeks, meows from the box Mingyu’s holding.

“ _Mingyu_.”

Wonwoo doesn’t trust his voice, and it cracks in the middle underneath the pressure of all the heat suddenly rushing to his eyes.

There’s a tiny kitten peering at him from the cardboard box in Mingyu’s grip. A very familiar kitten, with very familiar black fur and amber eyes.

“Haku?” Wonwoo says, voice strangled.

“Yeah,” Mingyu says, features softening as he smiles down at the little black kitten. “It’s Haku.” 

“But… _how_?”

“I’ve been thinking about adoption for a while now. Y’know, ‘cause you love cats so much but you’ve never been able to have one. When I asked the shelter about adopting her, they were so sure she would’ve been taken already by the time your birthday came around. I asked them to hold onto her for you.” 

Wonwoo feels light-headed, _dazed_ , everything is moving soft and dreamlike, like it’s not quite real.

“You mean she — she’s _ours_?” 

Mingyu grins, sunlight illuminating his face even at ten in the evening. “Yeah, baby. She’s ours.” 

She’s so small. _She’s so small._ There’s a little red collar around her neck and a golden pendant that says KOHAKU on it. When Wonwoo reaches out to let her sniff at his fingers and re-familiarise herself with who he is, he catches a glimpse of the other side of the pendant: JEON WONWOO, 02-312-8735. It’s this detail that sends him over the edge, the wetness of his eyes brimming and threatening to spill over the floodgates. 

“Go on, pick her up,” Mingyu says gently, his eyes big and encouraging.

Wonwoo hesitates, his heart clenching so tight it feels like it might go supernova right then and there. He reaches for her, cupping his hands beneath her with the softest touch, stroking between her ears as he lifts her out of the box. She’s so tiny in his hands. So tiny, yet commanding. It’s like the world and his focus has shrunk down to the space between him and this tiny creature he’s holding, this little thing nuzzling against his thumb that’s more precious than anything he’s ever held in his life.

 _Haku._  

“Happy Birthday, Wonwoo.”

Wonwoo glances up, and Mingyu’s been filming the entire thing with his phone. He feels like he should be embarrassed at the tears glinting in his eyes but he can’t find it in himself to feel anything but marshmallow softness and candlelight warmth.

Mingyu did this for him. Somehow, he found the perfect present for Wonwoo that he never could have dreamed of himself.

“Mingyu — ”

His voice is thick, strained with all the emotion pouring into him that he doesn’t know how to translate into words and sentences and the speech he has on his tongue etched into the lining of his heart: 

_I love you. Thank you. For everything. Thank you for being with me. Thank you for choosing to love me. Thank you for staying by my side all this time, from the very beginning. I love you._

_You’ve brought so much happiness into my world that I didn’t think I was capable of feeling._  

Mingyu closes the distance between them, leaving a little gap for Haku as he tilts Wonwoo’s chin up with his finger so he can kiss him. It’s slow and devastating in its tenderness, the warmth of Mingyu’s lips bringing the cold of his to a sweet equilibrium. And it’s not because Mingyu’s his perfect other half; it’s not because he makes him _complete_. It’s because he’s the glimpse of sun in the heart of winter, the sight of blue sky encompassing a thunderstorm, taking it into its arms and whispering, _it’s okay, it’s okay,_

 _you’ve done well, you’re doing your best,_

_it’s okay_.

Wonwoo used to think that being in love felt like drowning.

At first, being adrift at sea, lulled by the pull of the tide serenading the shoreline, felt like bliss. It was comforting knowing that no matter how far he swam, the feeling of love and warmth would always be with him, swallowing him up, filling him with air and light and all the necessities he needed to live. _This feels right, this has to feel right,_ he’d think to himself, _this has to be_ enough, and he’d believe it, he’d let the words carve themselves into the hollows inside of him and settle down there, deep in his marrow, the linings of his veins, the curves of his ribs, because if it isn’t, _then he must be fucking broken._ He’s just. Broken. _And all of this, all of the love and trust and commitment people keep trying to give me, are just more things that he — ungrateful, undeserving, incapable_ — can’t _do._

For the longest time, he carried these thoughts, these secret harboured torments and flashpoints of self-loathing within him like a compass rose pointing true north. He would use it to orient himself in times of doubt or loss. In the worst moments of barren loneliness and hollowness, he would take these truths out like flower petals pressed between curled yellow pages and soothe himself with the knowledge that this was for the best.

All of this he kept inside of him, in his head, like a map of everything wrong with him, broken down to the last, insignificant detail. Something solid and real that he could point to and say _here_ , and _here_ , these are the reasons why being alone is better than being in love and being a letdown. _Here_ , the jagged cliffs and hazardous bluffs where his plague of anxieties has worn him to bone. Here, the sharp precipice from which his happiness hangs, an illusion of nearness that taunts like siren song, eternally just out of reach, whispering to him how achievable it could be if he just _tried_ a little harder, if he just held onto that shred of hope for a _little longer_. Here, the sea itself and its treacherous depths, blue and so clear you can see the sun reflected on its surface until the sky turns and it’s a black, bottomless plunge into a never-ending nothingness. 

Here, here, _here_ , a thousand million points of light sucked into an event horizon and decimated before it can ever touch the stars. All these little forms of cruelty, of loneliness, he uses to distance himself from the reality of having to _feel_. 

It’s a terrible burden, having a heart that wants to love and being so afraid of letting it that you armor yourself against vulnerability and cling to the protection isolation gives you. You don’t realise how impossibly lonely it is, living in fear of your own feelings is, until someone shows you how much it means to trust someone with them. 

Mingyu, with his confidence and endless charisma and soft, tender heart, with his feelings worn out in the open — bright and honest and so _genuine_ — found his way past Wonwoo’s walls without a map or a key. Maybe because Wonwoo was always supposed to meet him, was always supposed to love him, but fate and providence doesn’t work quite like that. Their story, _their relationship_ , isn’t the work of kismet or serendipity. Just pure chance. And the time and trust and love built between them — it’s Wonwoo realising how to let someone care for him without being suffocated, how to _love_ without letting it consume him, how to stay and refuse to let fear win, to open himself up to the bone, and trust someone enough to see past the crushing misery and anxiety and loneliness and the shame of merely existing — to _see_ him. 

He _gets_ things about love that he didn’t understand before Mingyu not because he loves Mingyu, not because _love_ is the answer to all the questions he’s been holding inside of him like the remnants of a storm, like debris washed ashore, but because he knows now, what it feels like for love to be a safety net rather than a lifeline. He knows this with a certainty he didn’t have before now: 

 _You cannot make someone else responsible for your happiness._  

You cannot ask the person you love to be your life raft when you’re drowning and then wonder why you’re both sinking.

Mingyu refuses to become his shipwreck. He burns too brightly and wondrously, he’s too much _him_ to ever become part of Wonwoo’s self-destruct mechanism. And he has never, once, demanded that Wonwoo be anyone other than himself. Being in love with Mingyu is still all-encompassing, it still feels ubiquitous, but Mingyu isn’t the ocean where rip tides and maelstroms lie in wait. He’s the open sky. Endless. With no visible beginning or end, just the limitless horizon arcing to catch the moon and stars. He’s the warmth of dawn that lights his skin and his bones, seeping into the cracks of him, ushering the shadows to his touch, not to extinguish them but to keep them company like a steadily burning sun. 

How does he begin to explain to Mingyu what he has done for him? What he _means_ to him?

Wonwoo breathes in, brow furrowing slightly as he exhales, the air brushing Mingyu’s lips and making the lock of his hair curving over his brow bounce.

He locks eyes with Mingyu, helpless, hoping that he can feel even a fragment of what he feels being with him, the way sunlight can’t be grasped or touched or even quantified but it’s always there, an intangible constant, a feeling of safe, warm — _alive_.

“I don’t — I don’t even know where to start,” Wonwoo admits.

Mingyu smiles, and Wonwoo feels it before he sees it.

“It’s okay, I get it.” He whispers, like it’s a secret just between the two of them, the world narrowed down to just the two of them, the sky and the sea. “You think I don’t know how to love you?” 

The heat in Wonwoo’s eyes swells and suddenly he can’t see past the blurry outline of Mingyu’s face, he’s just pinpoints of light and shimmering colour.

“Ah, hyung,” Mingyu chuckles, voice sounding thick as he reaches to brush his tears away with his thumb. “If you cry, _I’ll_ start crying.”

Haku mewls, butting her head against Wonwoo’s hand as if to say _Enough_. _Me time now._

Wonwoo chokes out a watery laugh, petting softly at her fur as Mingyu kisses him again. Byeol, tired of being left out of the fun, barks and jumps around Mingyu’s heels until he bends to pick him up. Wonwoo kisses Mingyu again and Byeol takes the opportunity to sniff warily at Haku until she grows tired of his investigation and bats playfully at his nose, startling a surprised bark out of him. Mingyu bursts out into laughter, his soft giggles joining Byeol’s disgruntled whine and Haku’s hissing.

 _This is it_ , Wonwoo realises, and it’s this moment, unspectacular and ordinary and so utterly far from the profound. _This feeling, this inimitable thing people call happiness,_ this —

_this is what life is meant to be lived for._

 

 

\-----

 

 

They’re a family of four now, which is a weird thought to be having barely a year into their relationship. But Haku settles in like she was meant to be here all along and Wonwoo thinks he finally understands what it means to have something in his life that he’ll always get to come home to. 

He doesn’t stay past the end of the work day anymore unless absolutely necessary. He doesn’t volunteer to take on extra cases on top of his already extensive workload; his weekends are too full now for that. 

He has Haku to think of.

Taking care of Haku is a full-time job split between him and Mingyu like newlywed parents. Being only eight weeks old, she’s not fully toilet trained yet, meaning there are sometimes still accidents and slip-ups. Although it’s hard mustering up any anger or lasting frustration when the culprit meows and blinks at you with her big yellow-gold eyes and you can physically feel your heart growing three sizes. 

If there’s anything Wonwoo’s grateful for, it’s how well Byeol has handled all this. Truth be told, the only reason he _hasn’t_ adopted a stray until now is because he’d always been worried how Byeol would react to having another pet in the house when his relationship with Wonwoo used to border on strained and difficult at times. Mingyu’s been slowly introducing Haku and Byeol to each other when Wonwoo’s out of the house, and they’d met at least four times before Wonwoo even knew about Haku’s existence.

They’re frenemies at best, which is all that Wonwoo can really ask for. They’ll fight and squabble about who gets to eat first when Mingyu and Wonwoo are putting out breakfast or dinner, and they’ll fight over attention when only one of them is home so they’re forced to share the spotlight, but it’s never out of serious antagonism. 

Sometimes if Byeol is in a good mood he’ll even let her play with his whale toy 2.0, the newly bought version that Mingyu acquired after he chewed the last one beyond repair. 

Haku’s very self-aware about the fact that she has them both wrapped around her tiny little paw. It’s obvious that Wonwoo’s her favourite just from the way she melts whenever he’s around. Which is not to say that she _dislikes_ Mingyu, she adores him, in fact. But it’s in the way that a kid on the playground adores their crush — with obnoxious banter and merciless teasing. She’ll ignore Mingyu in favour of sitting on Wonwoo’s lap or riding his shoulder but the moment Mingyu looks away she’ll be boring holes in the back of his head willing him to pay attention to her again. 

Wonwoo was never much of a photography person until he got Haku. Now, his camera roll is just two thousand and fifty-seven pictures of Haku, Haku and Mingyu, him and Haku, Haku and Byeol. 

Mingyu’s thinking of starting an Instagram page for them because he’s certain they’ll go viral and it’ll be a good way to document their growth over the years. He sounds like a soccer mom that fills handmade scrapbooks with pictures of her kids whenever he brings it up. Wonwoo can’t help but find it endlessly endearing.

It’s cute. They’re all very, _very_ cute: his kitten, and his dog, and his equally cute boyfriend. 

 

 

\-----

 

 

 

It’s a Wednesday, arguably the worst day of the week, and it’s one of those days where nothing is _wrong_ , exactly, nothing that he can pinpoint and dissect. It’s just him. He wakes up exhausted, and goes to work exhausted, and at some point in the day everything feels like it’s being slowly unwound. Like he’s standing here in the shadow of someone else’s life, watching it all go past him, helpless to do anything but observe. He used to think he was done feeling like this but it’s not something that _goes away_ because your life is suddenly perfect and picturesque with your beautiful, loving boyfriend and cat and dog.

He gets home late, having texted Mingyu hours earlier that he’d be working overtime. Mingyu had replied with a small sad face emoji and then an _in case i don’t see you till tomorrow, i love you_.

Till tomorrow. 

It’s such a crushing yet somehow comforting feeling to know he’ll go to sleep and wake up in the morning and everything will still be exactly the same. The world will still continue spinning on its axis, moving in its orbit around the sun, with or without him. 

When he gets home, he toes his shoes off at the door quietly and pads into the living room to find Mingyu asleep on the couch. Haku is curled on his chest, her little tail wrapped around herself, and Byeol is asleep in Mingyu’s lap. Wonwoo’s chest clenches helplessly, the way it always does when he sees them — _his family_ , the person and two pets he’d do anything for. It’s enough to alleviate the migraine threatening at his temples and momentarily soothe the storm brewing in his head.

Wonwoo comes over to the couch and reaches down to brush a lock of hair from Mingyu’s forehead. He’s usually a deep sleeper but the motion, on this particular night, wakes him.

“Hey,” he says, blinking his eyes slowly open, looking sleep-ruffled and disoriented, but still happy to see Wonwoo.

“Hi,” Wonwoo whispers, keeping his voice quiet so as not to wake the other two.

“Did you eat already?” Mingyu asks.

“No, I didn’t feel like it.” 

Mingyu frowns, eyebrows knitting together. “Why not? _Hyung_ , we talked about this. You should’ve called. I’ll go heat up some leftovers.”

“Mingyu.” Wonwoo says, softly. “Please. Not right now.”

Mingyu falls silent. He eyes Wonwoo soundlessly for a few beats and then he lets it go. 

“Okay.” He tilts his face. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” Wonwoo shakes his head. Not because Mingyu won’t listen and that he won’t be able to help make things better, but because he just. He can’t. He doesn’t want to ruin Mingyu’s day, too, right now, by being a reminder of how helpless he makes Mingyu feel trying to be everything for him and still falling short because that’s his mind doesn’t answer to love or safety. Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. They can talk, and Mingyu will hold him and the world will be quite for a few moments. 

“Okay,” Mingyu echoes. “Help carry the kids to bed with me and then we can cuddle.”

Wonwoo gathers Haku gently from Mingyu’s chest, features softening as she sniffles and nuzzles deeper into his hands. Mingyu picks Byeol up, cradling him like a newborn, and he follows Wonwoo’s lead to the bedroom. Wonwoo showers and changes into pyjamas and joins Mingyu in bed, Byeol and Haku nestled together at their feet on the covers, for once playing nice in their sleepy states.  

He curls himself up on Mingyu’s chest, Mingyu’s arm resting beneath his head and wrapping around his shoulders. 

“Tell me something good,” Wonwoo says in the dark.

“Haku climbed up on the bookshelf and knocked over the vase my aunt gave me for my last birthday.”

Wonwoo snorts. “How is that good?”

“Well, it was an ugly vase. And she doesn’t believe in people ‘choosing’ to be gay.”

“Oh, that _is_ good.”

“Mhm. And Haku looked so proud of herself I literally high-fived her for it.”

“We really shouldn’t reward her for breaking things.”

“Perhaps.” Mingyu concedes. And then, out of nowhere: “You know I’ll always love you, right?” 

Wonwoo blinks, sleep already beginning to slow his movements. “Hm?”

“I just wanted you to know. Today, or tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years. I’ll always love you.” 

 _This man_ , Wonwoo thinks to himself. What did he ever do to deserve him?

“As in, like, I’ll always be here for you. Not even just as a boyfriend, but. If you just need someone. You can pretend I’m just that weird drunk guy who broke into your house to play with your dog buck naked and talk to me like we don’t know anything about each other. Pretend I’m just — your best friend. If that makes it easier to say things out loud.”

“If you were _just_ my best friend I’d still love you just as much.”

“Oh.” Mingyu says, a small smile curving at the edges of his mouth. Wonwoo lives for the little sparkle of happiness in his eyes.

“I — I feel like I’m saying this all wrong and none of it makes sense but… do you — get what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“I just don’t want you to feel like you’re letting me down, or not being enough, because it’s hard. I don’t care about that. I just — I want you to be okay. I want you to be happy — that’s. _I know_ that’s like. The thing that you don’t want to talk about. But you… you make _me_ so happy. Every day of my life. I wish — I want you to feel that, too.”

 _Mingyu._ Oh, Mingyu. Wonwoo doesn’t cry much, ever. But hearing Mingyu bare his heart and offer up its innermost truths to Wonwoo, just like that, his throat feels tight like he’s holding back tears.

“You do make me feel like that. You do. I promise.” Wonwoo reaches for Mingyu’s hand, threading their fingers together.

“You make it better just by being you.”

Mingyu smiles softly, and it’s like sunlight limning the edge of the clouds on a day of grey sky.  

“Tomorrow,” Mingyu says. “Let’s order in dinner tomorrow. We’ll have an indoor picnic.”

“It’s a date.” 

“Don’t be late, okay?” Mingyu lifts his brows at him. 

“Alright.” Wonwoo says, lifting their hands so he can kiss Mingyu’s knuckles. “Goodnight, Mingyu.”

“G’night.”

Mingyu drifts off not long after. Wonwoo stays awake for a few more minutes just watching him, tracing the lines of his face as he sleeps. He’s never been more certain that he doesn’t deserve him. And he knows it’s what drives Mingyu to do what he does for Wonwoo, trying to make Wonwoo see that he _does_. That he is. Deserving. 

 _in case i don’t see you till tomorrow, i love you_.

Tomorrow, he’ll wake up to the sun, and Mingyu laughing as he kisses him good morning before he goes on his morning run, and Haku meowing and climbing across his chest demanding to be played with. 

Tomorrow, things will be better. It might not be entirely true, but the hope that it will be is enough. It’s _more_ than enough.

Mingyu twitches and tightens his arms around him in his sleep, the warmth radiating from him soaking through Wonwoo’s skin and deep into his bones, heating him from within like sunlight.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> and that's a wrap for the sun and the silver lining and it's extended universe. 
> 
> i've had the absolute best time writing this fic. thank you a thousand times over to everyone that's read and supported this fic and left me comments and cc's and to everyone who's taken a moment to let me know my writing touched them in some way. thank you jü and ele especially for getting me to the end, your words and encouragement mean the world to me.
> 
>  
> 
> [twitter](http://twitter.com/MIN9YUA)  
> [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/gyuwu)


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